One of the subjects we often see a great misunderstanding in, is the usefulness of cloud-hosted blockchains. As one of our major initiatives is our Blockchains-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform and our new GovCloud BaaS platform with our partner SkyScape, we obviously think that cloud-hosted blockchains perform a valuable service for a variety of reasons.
One of the biggest reasons we think that cloud-hosted blockchains are so meaningful is that they finally allow us to deploy trusted apps and services that run on untrusted servers. This is incredibly meaningful when you start looking at the amount of time, energy, and risk we take when deploying services that require a high level of trust today, and allows companies for whom reputation is at the core of their business to start utilizing the flexibility and scale of cloud-computing even in their most critical applications.
Utilizing a blockchain as the backbone for your service’s logic means you can deploy to hardware that isn’t under your control and still be assured no one has compromised your service. Not only that, but your customers can also verify this is the case, lessening the requirement for constant trust on all those involved.
Adding on that, building on a blockchain platform provides you with a few additional benefits right off the bat. You get a higher degree of security due to switching customers over to public key authentication, depending on your workload you get automatic horizontal scalability, and your service’s data is stored in an immutable fashion, adding greater reliability and transparency to your and your customer’s data.
As you can see, building your next trust-driven service on blockchain technology allows for greater flexibility on how you deploy and maintain your service, without compromising on security. At the same time, it allows customers to have greater confidence a service is being run honestly without needing to hold as much trust in the underlying business behind the service.
While the biggest wins stemming from this type of architectural deployment will stem from the medium and long term, once a greater ecosystem of trust-driven applications are available to be incorporated in this infrastructure, we’re already seeing a great deal of demand and potential even from standalone services that can benefit from the extra layer of transparency and auditability that comes automatically with blockchain-driven services.
As an example, we’re exploring a wide swath of use cases with various government bodies that would like to utilize blockchain technology in their services as an auditing and reconciliation layer which is completely orthogonal to many of the use cases we’ve been seeing come out of the financial services industry. It’s very much an example of how technology that was conceived for a specific purpose can often provide value in areas where it wasn’t originally considered applicable.
This isn’t to say that every new service should be built on blockchain technology or should be hosted in the cloud, but utilizing a cloud-hosted BaaS platform does mean you can concentrate on the important parts of your service while cutting off a whole host of attacks that plague traditional services, even those hosted behind the corporate firewall.
At Credits, we think this is only going to become a more and more compelling option over time, and we’re committed to enabling all of these use cases on our underlying platform. If you’re looking to build your next service on top of blockchain technology, feel free to reach out, and we’ll work with you to find out if our technology makes sense to help you achieve.
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