Could Blockchain Technology Be An Answer to Your Biggest IT Challenges of 2019?

Back in the day, there was a time when the main concerns for IT departments were the rate of resolution for helpdesk tickets, the cost per ticket, and user satisfaction. While these are still important, today’s IT managers are not only responsible for rolling-out major technologies across the company, but they are also being challenged with new innovations, new automation approach, and new technologies that aim at making their enterprises safer and more profitable.

In order to do so, savvy companies in industries across the spectrum emphasized using digital technologies to gain a competitive edge, to connect better with customers, and to improve efficiency. Many of them employed their IT departments to make their organisations more digital competent by introducing the concept of digital transformation —   the process of using digital technologies to create new — or modify existing — business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements. Interestingly, despite the advanced state of planning their digital future, only 7% of European companies consider their technology level as advanced*.

As the organisation grows, there also arises the need to outsource IT.

A decade ago, the decision to outsource was a fairly straightforward one. CIOs identified the need, sought RFPs from IT service providers, conducted their due diligence, selected a vendor, inked a contract, and the transition began. Today, the decision to outsource is more risky and complicated. This is mainly due to degradation in service quality, loss in incumbent employee know-how, rising cyber theft concerns, and businesses being widely targeted by malicious individuals trying to access tones of confidential data stored on centralised systems, what limits the trust to third-party providers and often makes the outsourcing process more lengthy and costly for the business.

While some of those hesitations are the barrier of perception, without infrastructure such as blockchain technology, it may be impossible for some enterprises to fully capitalise on digital opportunities.

Improving transparency with blockchain technology

While many business leaders might perceive blockchain technology as a ledger that is mainly used to create and operate the cryptocurrency projects, the idea of a decentralised, distributed ledger dwells within a much wider spectrum. Blockchain infrastructure is without question an emerging technology of the future, with a clear goal of cutting down costs and speeding up the business process, without compromising data security and trust between the parties involved.

One of the industries where blockchain technology can be extensively applied is Information Technology. Blockchain infrastructure can be used to develop cost-effective and secure business solutions and tools, which can boost your IT department performance and provide a fair return on investment (ROI). For example, at KompiTech, we are currently developing a blockchain-based solution called BLITS, which smooths the operations and communication process between the IT department and the external IT provider. The tool, thanks to the latest cutting-edge technology available, allows automating the service agreement into a Smart Contract, IT processes, and the Servicedesk for faster and more efficient service delivery, while eliminating the risk of human error – which effectively reduces the operations and management cost of the business.

With the rising concerns of personal data protection, applications that operate on the blockchain infrastructure could also be an answer. As the pieces of information are being introduced to the single distributed ledger using a peer-to-peer system encrypted, your important business data including smart contracts and service-level-agreements made between the organisations are safely stored within BLITS, which means that they cannot be manipulated nor amended in any way. This means that SLAs are not breached, and a mechanism for automating instances of services breach detection is in place to appropriately and automatically allocate penalties, as stipulated in the service agreement. Moreover, the blockchain ecosystem does not run on a single server and uses peer's verification instead, making the system practically un-hackable – which adds this extra layer of security to the IT system, making it resistant to fraud.

Blockchain-as-a-Service for business

Another way to scale your business using the idea of a distributed ledger is by building and deploying your own business application that leverages Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform. This solution would particularly fit organisations in industries such as finance, healthcare or public services – i.e., industries looking to reduce the cost of maintaining their IT infrastructures, while also keeping the data safe and secure.

Enterprise applications built on private blockchain network that is running on a BaaS platform, such as KompiTech Manblock, benefit from a fully maintained and scalable environment, which allows them to grow proportionally to the business. In most cases, BaaS infrastructures operate on popular blockchain frameworks, such as Hyperledger Fabric, which allows programmers to deploy and launch their modular applications with just a few clicks. The blockchain application can be later integrated with an existing authentication system for user-access management and interact with the blockchain network to store encrypted and sensitive data inside the secure ledger.

*http://www.advance2000.com/digital-transformation-statistics-for-business/