Why Governments & Enterprises Need Blockchain Powered Digitization More Than Ever

Throughout the last decade blockchain’s promise has expanded beyond its original intention to reinvent finance; industries all over the world are racing to leverage this technology’s unique capabilities.

Enterprise Blockchain: The Other Side of The Coin

Analogy of two sides of a coin is perfect way to describe crypto and enterprise variants of blockchain technology use cases. Both sides of the coin are important but offer different outputs, same is the case with a coin on the blockchain.

Both 2018–19 were eventful years for the overall crypto applications of blockchain, as governments around the world began to not only take notice but also crackdown on cryptocurrencies, quick to classify and regulate this new digital asset by providing the necessary framework needed. It seems this transition will continue for another two years.

Due to the fact that enterprise blockchain applications offer no regulatory concerns and offer results for improving integrity of systems, the year 2020-21 is the time for enterprise side of the blockchain coin to thrive. As a low hanging fruit, the enterprise blockchain adoption is already on the rise across the globe especially with government entities. Results from many surveys can testify to this trend.

Plenty of content is already available for use cases of enterprise blockchain. News for deployments of blockchain applications in different organizations and government entities are also a regular feature of today’s tech media. Slowly but surely enterprise blockchain is moving for mainstream adoption. Challenges arising from the spread of the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) are likely to accelerate the use of existing and new technologies and tools. Progression in technology usage is definitely going to rise. Blockchain offers plenty of value for this upcoming technology-enabled future new world. Here are a couple of important new application areas for enterprise blockchain.

Blockchain Powered Work from Home (Remote Working) Solutions

The outbreak of COVID-19 has brought big disruption and inconveniences to the affairs of people governance around the world. But the adoption of innovative technologies including Blockchain can ease the pain by making it easier especially for governments to offer virtual services with complete trust and integrity.

With work from home becoming the norm in the post COVID-19 new world order, the need for Blockchain powered corporate governance/workflow management systems is in demand more than ever. The biggest reason employers and HR departments don’t promote remote work (work from home) is obviously because of the lack of trust towards employees. Blockchain based corporate governance or workflow automation can easily bridge this gap. By leveraging blockchain, organizations can preserve the integrity of their data without sacrificing strengths such as control, privacy, scalability, and robustness. All the data is going to be timestamped, encrypted, cryptographically signed, and redundantly distributed. Proprietary information would remain safe, secure, and decentralized on selected public or private infrastructures.

Blockchain can be used as the middleware meant to tie into existing legacy systems, there are methods for automating the flow of data from existing ERP systems to a distributed ledger technology. One way is to incorporate blockchain enabled digital signature with existing digital workflows, this would provide immutable evidence by publishing the timestamped evidence on digitally signed documents. Result would be documents that are shared and used by multiple parties trusted by everyone involved, and independently verifiable.

Enterprise Blockchain Countering COVID-19

Necessity is the mother of invention and when lives are on the line, that’s when people are really prepared to “move fast and break things”. Many technology applications which seemed like science fiction just a short time ago, disinfecting robots, smart helmets, thermal camera-equipped drones and advanced facial recognition software are all being deployed in the fight against COVID-19 at the heart of the outbreak. Blockchain as technology can improve some areas of preparing, responding & recovering from epidemic situations. Tech companies and startups in the industry have identified this and began to build blockchain solutions aiming to track drug supply chains, medical supplies, managing medical data of effected & recovered people, tracking donations, food safety, insurance processing, advising citizens and identifying symptoms of infection. Below are some ongoing blockchain initiatives happening around the world:

• IBM, Oracle and the World Health Organization (WHO) are joining hands for an open-data hub that will use blockchain technology to check the veracity of data relating to the coronavirus pandemic.
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the United States’ chief public health and disease prevention agency. CDC operatives show up wherever and whenever an outbreak of an infectious disease is detected. The CDC is researching how blockchain technology can become the latest weapon in their armamentarium to fight disease and prevent future epidemics from razing the world.
• MedsLOCK by Avantas Tech is a Disease Monitoring and Control app to provide real-time COVID-19 insights to government agencies, health officials, and other important stakeholders in responding to pandemic. Given the current level of mistrust and confusion around various data sources, it is crucial to have a single source of reliable information as the whole world is fighting against this outbreak. MedsLOCK empowers the critical need of integrity and intelligence in the ongoing collection and distribution of data to multiple parties. Core objective of MedsLOCK is to make COVID-19 data collection and exchange between stakeholders automated, transparent and trusted interacting in the real-time with distributed ledger technology. Its scalable design of using blockchain in collaboration with other emerging technologies would better prepare governments to predict, respond to and recover from the next crisis that threatens the world.

Blockchain is evolving fast as the technology evolves and innovates over time, with COVID-19 we will find more benefits of this technology at an accelerated rate. The only question is, at what cost? Some say its freedom, some say its progress, only time will tell.

Check out our recent interview with Muhammad Salman Anjum from Avantas Tech regarding COVID-19 situation in the Middle East and potential solutions for medical data tracking and privacy through MedsLock –