With the rising popularity of blockchain technologies, many companies are trying to figure out if or where it makes sense to adopt this technology. Companies started their technology journey with centralized, siloed systems. It took a while for them to become comfortable with storing data on the the public cloud as adoption isn't easy for those that are used to running their own IT shops, with a large number of disparate legacy systems and key-man dependencies. For many companies, blockchain is not a top priority. And it shouldn't be.

Blockchain concepts and technologies may only replace or supplement a small fraction of a company's technology footprint going forward; but where it can exist, it offers many benefits from its nature of being an immutable, secure and decentralized store of key data that is highly resilient and has the ability to streamline many processes.

To learn more, the only way to start seeing the intra and inter-organizational benefits is to experiment with the technology.

How can your company get started?

· Speak to your vendors and find out what they're doing in this space. Some cloud providers offer Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) solutions that offer an easy platform to develop blockchain solutions. You don't even need even to start here.

· There are many blockchain tools that will allow your DBA or DevOps manager to deploy a blockchain in minutes. Run a small Proof of Concept project with a basic use case (e.g. store an audit log on a blockchain).

· Reward your staff with a small amount of cash and ask them to get their feet wet by investing it into cryptocurrency on the various crypto exchanges. Through this process they'll learn about various alt-coins, the protocols behind them, look at the whitepapers to understand whether it is feasible and viable, and may spot opportunities to adopt mechanisms or tools from those projects internally. Just going through this exercise will help your staff understand what makes a good or bad business case.

· Hire or train key IT staff that understand the blockchain paradigm, the various proofing mechanisms and possess other business and technology domain knowledge (blockchain technology should not be deployed in isolation) before embarking on larger initiatives.

It is in the best interests of your business and technology teams to be aware of the latest industry developments. If you need guidance, speak to a professional in this field for advice.

Article written by Zaid Mahomedy, CTO and Enterprise Architect at Blockchain Advisory. Zaid has extensive experience working as an IT Architect on legacy and newer cloud-based enterprise technologies; preparing transition and target architectures and experimenting with new technologies (e.g. VR/MR/AR, IoT, Blockchain, Big Data, chatbots)

Email: zaid@blockchainadvisory.co.za



