From the fact that Patents, corporations, and enterprises are going all-in on Blockchain, it’s no secret that bitcoin has taken the world by storm. Whether you believe in hype or bursting the bubbles, there is no ignoring the fact that Blockchain has shocked our imaginations upon endless possibilities. What holds and what sticks is something anyone would like to predict right now. But, there is one certainty that has arisen i.e underlying technologies have begun to change the world. Thus, Blockchain is here, and it cannot be ignored.
The blockchain is one of the most discussed technologies in the boardrooms of the corporate world, and that too for some seriously good reason. The blockchain is fundamentally transforming how business is done with its ability to make B2B transactions more secure, transparent, and efficient.
Blockchain’s impact is predicted to deliver $176 billion of additional value by 2025, and it is forecast that 10% of the Global GDP will be stored in blockchain technology by 2027. While blockchain was one of the hottest topics in 2017, the discussion was predominantly focused on its potential.
The Strength of Blockchain:
Blockchain’s ledger is its key feature and is the reason many companies believe it has so much potential. Industries such as manufacturing, finance, and telecommunications have blockchain projects in the pipeline. A recent study by Cognizant indicates about one-third of executives are either currently using blockchain or considering incorporating it into their companies. Of the 3,000+ executives who took part in the survey, 80% planned to use a blockchain solution in response to financial shifts or to develop new business models.
While there is a noteworthy number of use cases of this technology, yet the boosting areas where it’ll be useful are majorly in the sector of efficiency & security. Because of the ledger in the blockchain technology, it is possible to record, identify & validate every other transaction 24X7.
Another use case where shippers that move goods in which a record would be helpful, blockchain can be transformative. Food producers, for example, are increasingly asked to have an audit trail to demonstrate green business practices, or for easy traceability of food-borne illness outbreaks.
Challenges Ahead:
There are certainly bigger & smaller issues that the business leaders might come across while they are thinking about blockchain technology adoption in their business. What basically slows us down is the cost, and with blockchain, everything takes seconds instead of minutes to complete. With this technology, companies will no longer have to wait for a client to get home, start a computer, open files, print them, read and mark them and then send everything back to repeat the process.
Yet, if by any chance your industry or business is in any way planning to pursue the blockchain into their work, carefully consider the below-mentioned obstacles that may be very helpful in knowing before your business takes a leap.
- Security & Confidentiality:
Given that blockchain allows organizations who might not fully trust each other to conduct secure, trusted transactions, security, and confidentiality are the keys.
As on a basic level, digital signatures are required to verify the sender and validate message integrity, as transports security to authenticate the endpoints of the communication and encrypt the message traffic.
A strong identity and key-management capabilities are essential for blockchain certificate authorities to authenticate identity and verify access privileges. Selective encryption of the sensitive data for restricted access by authorized peers is necessary to further enhance data and transaction privacy.
- Supportability:
One of the existing challenges is that once any business or organization has built a blockchain application for their particular purpose or use case, it becomes necessary to put it into production to show the promised results. Here being the emerging technology, it may be short of staff to assemble, harden and support the blockchain network components.
Now the question arises as to what will be the solution for the day-to-day troubleshooting and monitoring or rather who will provide the businesses with the one-stop solution for all the needs? Thus, with a production line blockchain, supportability becomes one of the major obstacles to deal with.
- Resilience:
Most of the time, the business systems are made to survive the breakdowns or downtime when any one component within the network or multiple components fail thereby enabling the recovery & continuous monitoring of the failed components so that the system may work without any obstruction. But the same has to be replicated in blockchain technology especially around minimizing intervention.
To be precise on the blockchain obstructions and the readiness of any business to be able to take a leap on this emerging technology, we think that we must focus on counting the efficiency.
As efficiency is basically dependent on the time saved and in turn time saved is the money earned which is possible through this technology only. Moreover, it is equally necessary to workout on the kinks of data management & workflow in order to pull the trigger on the blockchain.
