The movement towards Enterprise Blockchain is a happening right now. What was once only an investigation is now being implemented. As identified by Gartner, Information Technology spend within businesses is up 4.5% in 2018 from 2017. The growth in spend is attributed for AI, IoT and Blockchain. More and more organizations are beginning to realize how their business processes could be enhanced through the implementation of Blockchain Technology. We will only see more businesses adopt Blockchain Technology as Gartner suspects that by 2023 Blockchain will add $176B of business value to organizations.
Some of the benefits realized by implementing technology revolve around reducing cost, automating processes, increasing transparency, establishing trust and increasing security. These benefits can be applied to specific Use Cases within Businesses across a wide range of industry verticals and horizontal application. To name a few industry verticals:
- Transportation
- Finance
- Travel
- Insurance
- Healthcare
- Media
This bring us to the most important topic of this discussion. What do Businesses require in order to even consider implementing this type of new tech? The requirements that Enterprise organizations require for their Blockchain Solutions are much different than what consumers are looking for. For starters, businesses won’t want to have their transactions open for public viewing. The security of their data is critical and should only be accessible by those that are granted the proper permissions. This is one of the main rationale behind public vs private Blockchains (permissioned vs permissionless networks…see previous blog post). The difference between public and private blockchains deserves it’s own blog post, so we won’t go into the differences here. However, for the sake of justifying a point, the benefits businesses will experience by implementing a private network include lower latency, higher throughput, private transactions and less complex consensus protocols of public networks.
The main requirements/components of a private blockchain that Enterprise organizations will adopt are:
- Private Distributed ledger
- Smart contracts that follow a specific business logic
- A consensus mechanism that has been tested and accepted
- Identify Management
- Permissioning
- Access Control
- Business intelligence Reporting
As Microsoft Partners, we are happy to say that Microsoft has provided all of the above by being forward thinking and leveraging their best-in-class Azure resources. Through the deployment of Microsoft Azure’s Blockchain as a Service or the Microsoft Azure Blockchain Workbench business are able to quickly configure and deploy a private network based on a popular Blockchain frameworks such as Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric and Corda. From an administrative perspective Microsoft enables organizations full control of their Blockchain network through the already familiar Azure Active Directory, Azure KeyVault, Resource Groups, SQL or Cosmos DB, Logic Apps, etc. These types of tools are essential and scalable for Enterprise adoption of Blockchain Technology.