Today’s business executives face more data-related difficulties than ever before. An airline cannot provide consumers with the best itineraries at the best costs unless it has access to the most up-to-date information from all sales channels. Vehicle manufacturers struggle to produce autos quickly and cost-effectively when they are unable to exchange inventory and logistical information with their partners throughout the production and delivery process.
A chocolate company cannot see the origins of its cocoa beans and transfer them to retail consumers without detailed supply chain tracking. Problems such as these with transferring business data and having real-time access to partner data have emerged as some of the most critical challenges confronting corporate IT teams, producing a significant headache for business leaders.
Currently, up to 80% of critical company data lives outside of an organization’s four walls. Each corporation has its own truth, a copy of the data, and internal methods for reconciling “their” data with everyone else’s. As a result, applications with many data sources can be significantly more complex to develop, more expensive to maintain and operate and need costly escalation paths to deal with contradictory data.
What is it that is driving traditional blockchains to failing businesses? Because its designers made a fundamental strategic miscalculation by neglecting the cloud. This shortcoming left first-generation blockchain technology with a litany of avoidable scalability, uptime, and storage concerns, and burdened would-be adopters with tough, costly deployment barriers.
The next generation of blockchains has gone in a different direction. By combining cloud and blockchain technology, businesses can establish data sharing solutions in minutes rather than months, and they can easily grow to massive amounts of transactions. Some of the benefits of deploying next-generation blockchain technology include:
1# Next-generation blockchains store all data “on-chain,” from a single Boolean value to multi-gigabyte files, with no loss of ACID transactional capabilities. They can also employ standards-based schema languages to develop bespoke, tightly typed application programming interfaces that make creating and integrating apps straightforward.
2# SaaS-based and completely serverless: New blockchains are typically delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS), eliminating the need to create, defend, manage, and pay for infrastructure scaled to peak capacity as a prerequisite.
3# Privacy and security are prioritized: New blockchains and distributed ledgers offer out-of-the-box data privacy solutions, allowing data producers to quickly choose who may view or edit their data and files via easy authorization processes.
4# Energy and cost-effective: Next-generation blockchains are energy and cost-effective, avoiding the environmental impact of Proof-of-Work systems and benefiting from multi-tenanted cloud architectures, and these cost savings may be passed on to adopters.
The basic notion behind adopting blockchains to tackle data concerns remains appealing to enterprise leaders. With the next generation of blockchain technology, business executives can now reap the benefits of safe and scalable data-sharing platforms, backed by technologies that can genuinely make those claims for better communication across many parties a reality.
