What technology enables the processing of encrypted data without needing to decrypt it first?

Homomorphic encryption is the technology that allows for computations to be performed on encrypted data without the necessity of decrypting it first. This is a crucial advancement in the field of data security, particularly in cloud computing and data processing scenarios where sensitive information must remain confidential.

By employing homomorphic encryption, organizations can manipulate and analyze data while it is still encrypted, ensuring that sensitive information is not exposed during processing. This capability is particularly useful in environments where data privacy is paramount, such as in financial services, healthcare, or any field dealing with personally identifiable information (PII).

In contrast, the other options do not provide this specific functionality. Data masking alters the data so that it cannot be traced back to its original value, but it does not allow computations on the masked data. Tokenization replaces sensitive data with non-sensitive equivalents, which can facilitate data handling but also requires the original data for processing. Asymmetric encryption is primarily concerned with securing data transmission and ensuring that only the intended recipient can decrypt the data, rather than performing computations on encrypted datasets.