Blockchain could solve Data Integrity problems

As the world relies more heavily on data as the basis for critical decision-making, it is vital that this data can be trusted. And that trust is the key issue here.

People (Data Scientists, Chief Innovation Officers) are looking for ways to automate using data. Automation translates to efficiency which translates to value. This automation trend has increased through advances in business intelligence, big data, the rise of IoT and the necessary cloud infrastructure.

So why do I raise this trust issue? Isn’t this solved perhaps by the Industry standard DMBOK? It states the possible Data Quality Management processes.

Because data is vulnerable, not just to the breaches we hear about in the news, but to a much more subtle, potentially more destructive class of attack, an attack on data integrity. Data isn’t stolen but manipulated and changed.

Like this tech-savvy Staten Island high school student who studied advanced computer programming at an elite computer camp who used his skills to hack into a secure computer system and improve his scores.

Enter the Blockchain

A possible solution for assuring data integrity could be blockchain technology.

In a blockchain, time-stamped entries are made into an immutable, linear log of events that is replicated across the network. Each discrete entry, in addition to being time-stamped, is irreversible and can have a strong identity attached. So it becomes irrefutable who made the entry, and when. These time-stamped entries are then approved by a distributed group of validators according to a previously agreed-upon rule set.

Once an entry is confirmed according to this rule set, the entry is replicated and stored by every node in the network, eliminating single points of failure and ensuring data resilience and availability.

Future

Because the promises of data integrity and security are so strong, new systems can be built to share blockchain-enforced data among organizations who may not trust each other. And once an ecosystem has shared data that everyone can trust in, new automation opportunities emerge.

Smart contracts are perhaps the next step. It makes it possible that different parties create automated processes across companies and perhaps industries. Blockchain could be an ecosystem for cross-industry workflows involving data from multiple parties. Now an entire new class of loosely coupled integration applications can be created.