The Quiet Revolution of Blockchain in the Enterprise

New technology doesn’t have to be disruptive. Anna Bennett looks at how Gospel Technology is developing blockchain solutions that can integrate and work alongside legacy data management and security systems improving trust and collaboration throughout the enterprise.

Technology, especially the new stuff, is often seen as disruptive. And to be fair, it can be. We all know what happens when we try to implement major updates, widespread systems changes, patches, and so on.

But I’m going to paint a picture about what technology can do for organisations when it’s not disruptive. When it’s the very antithesis of disruptive and quietly revolutionises an enterprise’s ability to perform and adapt to new world requirements such as digital transformation, regulation and compliance, with no drama whatsoever.

For all of the press around it, what Satoshi Nakamoto gave us with blockchain was the start of a quiet revolution. Not the loud and obnoxious crypto battle that plays out in the media, but the heart of the technology that underpins it – an immutable ledger with total security and trust to enable sharing of data between untrusted parties.

we use private, permissioned blockchain to deliver a product where trust between multiple entities can be totally assured

Gospel was formed in 2016 at a time – as now – awash with high profile data breaches. We came to the market looking to focus on the need to provide security, auditability and privacy at the data layer, encouraging an ethical approach to collaborating and managing the data whether the execution is internal (intra) or external (inter) of the enterprise. A big ask, but we believed achievable. Research we conducted, suggested that although many existing architectures already existed (mainly focused on cryptocoins) and consortiums were emerging, none of these apparent ‘out-of-box’ offerings are fit for Gospel’s purpose, explicity approaching its execution from a business value in the first instance.

The Gospel technology has been architected to utilise our own private, permissioned blockchain to deliver a product where trust between multiple entities can be totally assured. Our unique, patent-pending technology extends the consensus model to reading as well as writing data, meaning sharing data is simple and access can be revoked at any time, leaving no data access or traces of your most sensitive data.

Our contextual access control engine means that, for example, Fred, an external engineer, only has access to information about a part/assett when he actually needs to – when he is assigned to fit or repair it. More so, you can control the access in a granular manner down to the field level, so he might be able to see the part number, description and service history but not where it was purchased from or the identity of the engineers who worked on it. Equally, a purchase analyst might be able to see how many of a part were purchased and fitted but not which machines they were fitted to; operational granularity aligned to a individual/business purpose.

Further, access can be locational and circumstantial. For example, in her role as an Intellectual Property Protection Officer in an Aeronautical firm, when Jane is in her office on the corporate network she will be able to see and access highly confidential information that relates to her job. If Jane is sitting on unsecured public WiFi in a coffee shop, however, she won’t even be able to see that these documents exist, never mind get access to them.

But this technology isn’t deployed in a disruptive way. It’s deployed in a manner which assists the business, takes risk out of the enterprise structure and calms things down rather than agitates.

Existing security, compliance, operational and optimisation tools that have been introduced over the last decade, have had to compromise: security/protection to provide accessibility; privacy/ethics to provide collaboration; tick box training (CBT) to provide plausible deniability for the enterprise when an individual [unintentionally] violates its data sharing policies. Not with Gospel. Everything we build and implement has the ‘data’ purpose at its core, encouraging secure, permissible and collaborative accessibility.

We are working with major clients in manufacturing, aerospace, automotive, pharmaceutical and personnel industries and the use-case list grows stronger every week. If you have valuable and/or regulated data to which you need to grant parties secure and monitored access, whether within your own organisation or beyond, Gospel can help you to achieve it in an impressively undramatic and smooth way. Disrupting nothing except your ability to compete more effectively and focus your employees to drive greater business effectiveness!

Get in touch today for a call to discuss how we can help you and to see our live platform in operation.

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