THERE is no doubt that in the current global economy, blockchain is the future of finance, with bitcoin and ethereum looking to overhaul dated money systems.

Organizations at all levels are leveraging the power of blockchain to improve management of their assets on the Internet. Blockchain technology is not just disrupting finance, it is also revolutionizing the voting process, influencing the music industry and aiding crowdfunding platforms, to name just a few.

As well as this, blockchain technology is now looking to disrupt the whole of big data and the cloud computing industry. Businesses, as well as individual consumers, will soon be able to store their data in distributed cloud networks based on highly secure blockchain technology.

Today’s centralized cloud storage enables the distributed storage of data, but having multiple stored copies of this data can leave it particularly vulnerable to security threats.

As a result, consumer trust in data storage and security procedures are increasingly deteriorating. One example is the recent Equifax hack, in which the confidential information of 143 million Americans were exposed.

With this in mind, we must ask ourselves, should we really be handing our most sensitive data over to these giant corporations?

The Equifax Hack – "The breach also lends itself perfectly to future identity theft". https://t.co/qxSU9kYEMG #BCM206 — Phi Phi Nguyen (@hi_phiphi) October 16, 2017

Fortunately, blockchain technology holds the solution to the problem of traditional, centralized cloud storage, playing a pivotal role in helping to grow a decentralized internet. As a self-verifying sequential storage scheme, blockchain allows for data to be highly distributed, whilst also being highly secure.

How, you may ask?

On a decentralized blockchain, data is stored on many individual nodes which are strategically dispersed across the globe, making it extremely difficult for meaningful attacks to occur.

One Singaporean startup utilizing blockchain technology in data management is Bluzelle. The company aims to provide this decentralized database service for Decentralized Applications (dApps).

Bluzelle has built a fully integrated stack of blockchain applications, middleware and data services to support financial institutions, payment networks and insurance providers. The startup’s solution is for dApp developers who are dissatisfied with the costs, limited scalability, and complexity of existing database systems.

“The current internet infrastructure suffers from performance, reliability and security issues. Using blockchain for apps will resolve those issues,” Bluzelle’s CEO and co-founder Pavel Bains told Tech Wire Asia in an email interview.

The concept behind Bluzelle is that producers can rent out their hardware resources to the network, with consumers then using this network for their applications.

In order for this to work, Bluzelle wants to use its own cryptocurrency. Consumers will pay with tokens to access the database services and producers will earn those tokens for lending their resources to it.

“Facebook, obtains, managers and stores a lot of data,” said Bains when asked how the company plans on running apps such as Facebook on a blockchain system.

“A blockchain based decentralized database would manage that data more securely and efficiently than traditional databases.”

It said a peer-to-peer database is much more effective than centralized systems, which contain various attack points and opportunities for data theft.

With databases like Bluzelle’s, the records are not stored in one place but broken into little pieces and scattered around the world.

“Think of a Starbucks mug smashed to the ground, and then spread out in vaults around the globe,” he said.

“Even IF someone got a piece of that mug, they do not know what it is. They would have to break every vault around the world and put the pieces together.”

Blockchain technology, it added, is set to encapsulate many other industries outside of the financial sector, with supply chain being one of these.

“With the blockchain, people can track exactly where the product is, and where it originated from,” said Bains.

“It will ensure there are not any counterfeit goods… people will be able to trust the data is correct and everything is transparent. No one can cheat the system.”

Over the past 16 months, Bluzelle has provided solutions for global institutions, working with companies such as KPMG, Microsoft and Temenos. While working with these partners, Bluzelle founders Pavel and Neeraj recognized the need for an improved database service that could be utilized by developers of all sizes.

Bains explained that the company is targeting every industry for penetration with their technology. “Every business needs to manage and store their data,” he said.

“But we are starting with blockchain-powered applications. Then we move to general mobile and web application developers. The third group is enterprises.”

Bluzelle was recently appointed by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer for 2017 and was named in the Global FinTech 100. The startup recently closed its Series A funding round worth US$1.5 million, and plans to launch an ICO on Nov 21.