Are any of the practical implementations of ORAM being used in a real world system? The concept of Oblivious RAM (ORAM) was first introduced by Oded Goldreich and Rafail Ostrovsky in 1996. However, in the past 5-10 years there has been a surge in the amount of research that looks into various realizations, optimizations and implementations of ORAM. My questions are two-fold:


Although ORAM was introduced around two decades earlier, why is there a sudden spike in the interest of ORAM by the research community?
Various applications of ORAM have been put forth, which includes: secure computation, data-outsourcing and secure processors. Is ORAM currently being employed in any real world systems for an application that it was intended for? If yes, please provide me with some reference.
In addition to Paul's answer there is even an ORAM module inside a processor architecture, fully implemented: “A secure processor architecture for encrypted computation on untrusted programs”

Abstract:


  This paper considers encrypted computation where the user specifies encrypted inputs to an untrusted program, and the server computes on those encrypted inputs. To this end we propose a secure processor architecture, called Ascend, that guarantees privacy of data when arbitrary programs use the data running in a cloud-like environment (eg, an untrusted server running an untrusted software stack).