Gospel Technology releases latest version of its Secure Data Platform

This week represents another milestone for Gospel Technology with the release on Wednesday 14th February of version 2.5 of the Gospel Data Platform. This update focusses on delivering significant enhancements to performance and scalability as well as vastly improving our user interface and making a number of previously complex tasks much easier to achieve.

Performance capability

Whilst 2.5 is an incremental release, the performance improvements it delivers are in no way incremental. We’ve looked carefully at every part of the system and optimised every aspect that has an impact on users’ ability to securely read and write data. For instance, our contextual permission checking is now up to 1000 times faster than in Gospel v2.0 and triggers see a performance increase of up to 5x. We’ve also updated our record pagination to be simpler to use and made it a seamless experience in the UI which significantly reduces server load in its own right.

Faster deployment

Lastly, for this release we’ve touched up our deployment process from end to end – making it quicker and easier to deploy a Gospel node. This also means that we’ve been able to add IBM Cloud Container Service and Google Kubernetes Engine as supported providers adding to our service portfolio of AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and, of course, our support for bare metal servers and on premises VMs.

Simpler and easier permissions definition

We’ve been talking a lot recently about how Gospel brings context to access controls for data. This understanding of the data that is being accessed and how it relates to what the user is trying to achieve allows us to give far more fine-grained control over who can do what and when. In version 2.5, we’ve leveraged that power to make defining those permissions simpler and easier. We’ve also added the ability to control who can list records of a given type and their history, and surfaced audit logging controls in the UI.

Enhanced UI experience

Within the UI, we’ve also made it easier to access our powerful, contextual search capabilities as well as providing a simple, OAuth-like workflow for giving consent for data access. This means that when permission is required to allow data to be shared, the user can be sent an email or notification which leads them directly to a screen explaining the access required and asking for consent. Whilst this was possible previously, there was no specific user interface for it.

Our block explorer, BlockFlow has also been totally overhauled and now provides a far greater insight into the contents of the blockchain itself as well a much more pleasant user experience.

We look forward to bringing you yet more exciting developments in the coming months as we continue to develop with this fantastic technology!