5 Questions to Ask When Choosing Blockchain Solutions for Enterprise

With each passing year, more and more businesses are attempting to implement blockchain-based solutions. Although knowledge of the benefits of enterprise blockchain for business operations is gaining momentum, the technology continues to come against several obstacles that slow full adoption. Generally, it’s believed that several key issues need to be addressed before blockchain can become mainstream, such as interoperability, scalability, and costs.

Businesses looking at blockchain-based solutions will find that the majority of the well-known systems require costly hardware infrastructures, lack flexibility, and required specialized development from a limited pool of blockchain engineers. In this article, we’ll give you a series of questions to consider when selecting a distributed ledger technology.

Enterprise Blockchain Introduction

The enterprise blockchain is a permissioned blockchain used to track supplies or exchange digital information both inside the company and with other companies. This is also a ledger comprised of chronologically ordered, encrypted entries that may be used as a single data source across a dispersed network.

Features:

Different qualities combine to make the technology a reliable and secure system.

• Accountability

Every node in the network, which has a copy of the transaction history, is identified for its activities.

• Permissioned

The technology is only accessible to authorized users. Users are permitted to use the network at the network owner’s discretion.

• Immutable

In an enterprise blockchain, any verified record cannot be altered by network users.

• Secure

The data is secured with cryptography encryption and other security technologies to prevent system hacking and fraud.

Blockchain Solutions for Enterprises: Questions to Ask

• Is the protocol open-sourced and openly governed?

Simply posting code on an open developer site is not enough. There needs to be a governing body that maintains the code in line with enterprise needs. The Hyperledger project demonstrates what it means to openly govern an openly sourced code base, allowing any organization to submit suggestions, updates, and policies. Hyperledger openly validates the inputs through the technical steering committee to ensure innovations are supported which hardens blockchain for business.

• Who are the participants of the Blockchain network?

The next key question for an organization is; who are the participants of the blockchain network? Participants can include business partners, application providers, regulators, or even competitors. However, the majority of enterprise networks require that at least a core subset of the network members, if not all, need to be known to each other. We call this a permission network. Hyperledger Fabric allows a common identity verification scheme to be configured for a network. This scheme can be configured for a small private network or a distributed public-facing network. The key consideration is whether sufficient data will be known so that you can interact with sufficient trust in who is on the other side.

• Is the technology easy to Use?

Perhaps one of the most critical aspects of a distributed ledger technology for enterprise use is the ability to configure the technology for an enterprise-use case.

Key features such as consensus, permissions, and, database, should be modular to the needs of a specific use case. For instance, one use case may require every participant in the network to endorse transactions before they are considered valid, while others may have less strict requirements.

Many distributed ledger technologies struggle to support needed levels of modularity and therefore have to rely on bulky consensus protocols like proof of work more. Even worse, making changes to these aspects of the network even when used for a private network may require complex development processes to adapt.

Digitization of independent company processes and transactions

• Is the system capable of executing decentralized applications, such as smart contracts?

Smart contracts are the main part of Blockchain systems. In the context of the blockchain, a smart contract is a set of fixed rules defined as a software program. Examples are the definition of criteria under which a payment is made, the definition of quality criteria, and the rules if these are not observed. Because such coded and tamper-proof executed rules can remove a central authority, Smart contracts play an important role in automating cross-company collaboration.

• How should your developers utilize tech stacks and tools?

We run many training programs around the globe. One of the major difficulties we see is the developer stack. Developers can struggle to choose their tools and configure their environment globally. In our services, we’ll take you through the layers of the blockchain stack and explain how the emerging tools can be integrated into existing development environments and frameworks, including continuous integration, testing, and deployment.

• How does blockchain meet the key enterprise requirements?

Below are some factors to be kept in mind

• Regulatory risk — One of the biggest open questions in the blockchain space is the regulatory perspective of cryptocurrencies as an application of distributed ledger technology. Due consideration should be given to the likelihood of regulatory action on protocols supporting public cryptocurrencies.
• Support — Like any enterprise application, there needs to be an appropriate level of support for the entire stack. Whether through open source communities or platform and solution providers, support is needed from the build to production phases of adoption.

Conclusion

Now that, we’ve provided several questions to consider when choosing a blockchain solution for the enterprise. Whether it’s conducting proofs of concept on a range of technologies or even just trying out basic developer tools, getting hands-on with blockchain is the first step to adopting the technology.

Once you consider our enterprise blockchain company to help you build a market-specific permissioned blockchain app, you’re on the right track. At Gyan Solutions, we help to set up a standard infrastructure and cut down management costs. We aim at streamlining the processes across a global landscape with private blockchain applications and services.