Demystifying Blockchain Technology

In today’s scenario “Data” is most precious and valuable thing for business prospective and must be kept secured. In this digital era, the new technology is facilitating almost everything that makes business sectors more competitive and customer-friendly. In this process the organizations also gather a lot of personal information related to its customer and maintains it in their database, be it e-commerce companies like Amazon, Flipkart; travel companies like Trivago, OYO or Shopping stores like Reliance, Big Bazar etc… The organizations are also using this personal information to derive patterns related to personal preference, behaviour etc. using AI and build their selling techniques accordingly.

In this scenario, data security plays an pivotal role since business firms are utilizing tons of data generated by customers and others source . So it is equally important to handle and transforms such unstructured data in secure environment to prevent it for hackers or any kind of Cyber attacks.

Though many kind of security measures are been taken by the organizations, Blockchain is another technique of data security which is becoming popular in today’s time and can be used by every leading streams of business world.

What is Blockchain?

Blockchain is emerging technology for handling of data with full integrated secure environment. The concept of Blockchain seems bit complicated like how to represent data in the form of secure Blocks and its linkage with other blocks like a virtual chain and transformation of all those blocks in cryptographic secure decentralized environment .

Blockchain, is nothing but the database that contains information like records of user’s personal information, monetary transactions etc. that can be utilized and shared through a network. It can record transactions more effectively and in an verifiable manner. All the transactions are hashed and saved in different blocks. These blocks, which are in the shape of a chain, are inalterable and consequently can’t be tempered or deleted.

Since Blockchain is a decentralized network technology, and involves two parties in execution of each transaction in a cryptographical secured environment, it is impossible for any third party to access this transaction data and temper it.

This, generally, is the reason Blockchain is known as a complete secure environment for data transactions over internet.

In Blockchains that requires permission, the access cannot be obtained easily as it is vigorously managed. This feature is what makes Blockchain totally different from other ways of data security.

In my next blog, I will talk about the various areas where Blockchain is used in real world.

By Pradeep Verma

Assistant Professor

Area Chair – IT & Business Analytics