The Potential of Blockchain and Big Data Together

Blockchain is a powerful and important digital ledger technology that has reached early prominence due to its origin and use in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple. While nearly inseparable from the current cryptocurrencies craze, the reality is blockchain is very secure and versatile and can uniquely handle and store nearly any type of digital information. This is especially true as it pertains to big data given blockchain’s ability to provide big data with an innovative, secure and immutable way to record and store transactional data.

Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology comprised of a continuously growing file of encrypted transactions called “blocks” that are distributed across multiple nodes on a peer-to-peer network. One of the primary benefits of blockchain is that no centralized server or authority is required to hold or escrow these transactions.

Given blockchain is decentralized and does not allow previous transactions or blocks to be altered means it ideal for use in recording tamper-proof transactions and summary transactional data. This transactional data is the most common type used in big data by businesses globally.

The business need for blockchain and big data combined in industries like financial services, government and healthcare, along with many others, is strong. This is because these industries have numerous big data lakes and repositories full of important data that is critical to their businesses.

Many of these companies have a need to pool and share massive amounts of data with other companies, governmental agencies, insurers and joint ventures in their industry for fraud prevention, anti-money laundering, regulatory requests, compliance audits and joint ventures. So, if there is a better approach to securing the data, while ensuring its integrity when shared, then it is not “if”, but “when” big data and blockchain will become the primary way to share their important data.

For example, an insurance provider with questionable claims data or data sources has the potential to falsely deny claims for people in need, process claims slower, create compliance issues or put the insured’s personal data at risk creating greater liability for the provider.