nt vulnerability of data makes it difficult for organizations to make solid business decisions around it while also creating additional challenges when proving compliance to government or industry regulations.
Applied to this scenario, blockchain provides a trusted, independent, and cost-efficient proof-mechanism that ensures that log entries can’t be deleted or altered after the fact. For example, the Walmart Corporation is planning to leverage blockchain technology to help improve and ensure food safety standards throughout their entire global organization. Blockchain’s distributed ledgers are increasingly being used to ensure both the integrity of the process and the legitimacy of log data involved in all transactions—everything from tracking inventory to confirming payments to verifying that all tasks were conducted thoroughly and accurately along the way.
Two-thirds of companies surveyed said that they expect to integrate blockchain into their systems by the end of 2018.
Cost-Effective Alternative to Digital SignaturesDigital signatures are based on two or more groups that sign documents or other data, requiring a trusted third-party to issue signing certificates to verify that the signatures of all signing parties are authentic and that the signed data has not been altered. Providing a crucial security control in many organizations, digital signatures leverage certificates and complex mathematical algorithms to verify the legitimacy of data as well as protection against forgery when authenticating documents across email and other systems.
However, they come with a few downsides. Anyone who relies on digital signatures for authentication on a regular basis is familiar with the difficulty and cost of acquiring trusted certificates, the signing and safekeeping of those certificates, the uncertainty around whether a third party is truly impartial, and the difficulties in agreeing upon a provider that everyone can trust.
The advantage of blockchain is that it can provide proof of data integrity without the need for a third party as a go-between. Blockchain essentially builds out the business ledger by allowing multiple signatures, the creation of fingerprints and/or timestamps as an authenticator, and the distribution of information across multiple systems in a network as opposed to one centralized server.
With digital signatures and similar authentication needs, blockchain’s greatest value is in its ability to provide “proof-of-work”—transactions that cannot be edited or removed—integral in both securing and authenticating transactions with signature technologies.
The Future of BlockchainBlockchain’s real-world applications to ensure data integrity are boundless, ranging from maintaining compliance standards to ensuring profitability to tracking data that could save human lives. While blockchain is still experiencing popularity attributed to its hype, it’s no secret that the technology stands to revolutionize information management processes as we know them. If anything, blockchain will perhaps be most valuable when the business process crosses trust boundaries, requiring organizations to grant multiple parties access to the same data and the ability to manipulate it. That value will be further realized if transactions involve third parties controlling the data as a single source of truth or when business processes involve manual verification steps.
Blockchain has already begun to transform the way organizations and whole industries perceive and relate to information. While it’s nearly impossible to conceive of every future scenario, we’re likely only at the cusp of realizing the enormous information management benefits that blockchain will bring down the road.