Can businesses use blockchain to solve the problem of data management?

Data management is a continuous and unrelenting challenge for CTOs, but Pavel Bains – CEO of Bluzelle – believes blockchain technology could provide the solution

The rules around how data is stored, architected and queried are changing dramatically. With the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics driving the trend for big data, it’s expected to represent 30% of data stored in data centres by 2021.

What’s key is that the majority of this data is unstructured; Gartner predicts around 80%. Traditional databases, designed pre-internet, are unable to handle the type and volume of data being created. As a result, gone are SQL queries and relational database systems.

These traditional systems are built around the concept of structured data tied to very specific and narrowly focussed applications in limited domains. The amount of data and the scope of use of that data in these traditional systems is also limited, greatly reducing their viability in the world of unstructured big data paradigms. So, what’s next?

Current infrastructure for storing data is horribly inefficient. The reliance on third-parties for things like cloud storage (which many enterprises now do) raises a myriad of issues: not only is scaling expensive, but performance is significantly hindered when dealing with large amounts of data. Aside from the technical limitations imposed, there are privacy risks when trusting a service with information (particularly that which is sensitive) and we’ve seen an increasing amount of data breaches occur within centralised systems.

Businesses should be looking at alternative methods of storage – they’re in possession of more data than ever before (2.5 quintillion bytes of it are produced daily). And that data is wasted if it can’t be used to derive insights that can be leveraged to target a wider audience and increase revenue.

For storing data in this rapidly developing climate, it’s imperative that more resilient and efficient databases are created. They need to be highly secure and adept at catering to the needs of applications in the fields of IoT and AI. To these ends, I believe that blockchain technology is an ideal solution.

Instead of being run by an entity such as Amazon or Google, blockchain’s integrity is assured by nodes in the network that sync copies of the database.