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Blockchain in telecommunications: paving the way for secure and reliable data
Mumbai: Blockchain technology, renowned for its secure and decentralized nature, is making its way into various sectors, including telecom. The telecommunications industry, which constantly handles large amounts of sensitive data, is poised for a transformation with the advent of Dhiway’s CORD blockchain. This cutting-edge solution from the Bangalore-based company promises to strengthen trust and security in digital ecosystems, revolutionizing the way telecom operators manage and exchange data within their networks.
Digging deeper, Indiantelevision.com caught up with Dhiway’s co-founder and VP of engineering, Amar Tumballi.
Edited excerpts:
On the business challenges faced by adopting blockchain/DLT in the telecommunications sector
The telecommunications industry, a complex ecosystem of stakeholders, participants, service providers and consumers, is at a crucial juncture. Designing applications and services based on reliable data is a fundamental challenge. These data flows must be harmonized and have semantic interoperability and continuous assurance, making blockchain adoption a significant step forward.
The adoption of blockchain in the telecommunications industry heralds a new era of possibilities. It paves the way for innovative businesses, such as caller identification services, by leveraging reusable digital identifiers for IoT applications and services. The availability of secure and reliable data mitigates cybersecurity risks arising from data breaches and enables a paradigm shift in the design of applications and services, including artificial intelligence models and algorithms.
Some immediate successes were management of unsolicited commercial messages (or SPAM), infrastructure and roaming profiles.
On how CIOs and CSOs plan to adopt blockchain technology
C-suite leaders lead initiatives that balance risks and rewards while crafting an IT strategy focused on innovation. To effectively adopt blockchain technology, the technology stack must support strong collaboration and interoperability between services and functions. It is also important to adopt industry-leading best practices in infrastructure security and data governance to mitigate risks associated with cybersecurity incidents. Ultimately, shifting investment towards a set of “complete blockchain” solutions would help build the momentum and technical capacity within companies to benefit from the value of decentralized processes and infrastructure.
On the characteristics and capabilities necessary to evaluate in a blockchain implementation decision-making strategy
A key factor in evaluating a blockchain implementation is a thorough understanding of the use case and the business objectives that need to be achieved. An agreement between stakeholders and project sponsors on this topic can help facilitate the success of pilot and production implementations.
Blockchains enable a business-critical digital infrastructure, where the characteristics of immutability and transparency provide the necessary attributes for provenance and authenticity. Organizations seeking digital transformation strategies and adopting blockchain technology need to evaluate whether the code base is available under an appropriate open source license and whether the project on which the business product is based displays a vibrant community of participants. It is also important to ascertain whether some flagship implementations can support the choice of such blockchain frameworks. Tokenless blockchain frameworks like CORD allow companies to avoid the drama associated with tokens and crypto regulations by putting together a resilient infrastructure that is decentralized, secure, and extensible for many current and emerging use cases.
On the role that large public cloud providers play in shaping the adoption of blockchain technology in telcos
Highly scalable, resilient, and large public clouds have enabled companies to have the tools and infrastructure needed to quickly deploy, manage, and administer the nodes that make up the blockchain ecosystem. Elasticity, security, and high availability, even, in some cases, across cloud providers, have enabled large-scale blockchain deployments to meet many use cases. In many cases, the availability of cloud infrastructures securely configured for federal/government use has helped acquire the necessary certifications, making these blockchain implementations suitable for government use. Public cloud infrastructure offers developer-friendly standards-based tools, storage and compute resources, and redundancy, making it an attractive option for blockchains like CORD.
On regulatory issues that can be addressed through blockchain adoption
Today’s dynamic digital economy is driven by data: data production, exchange, processing and transformation drive applications and businesses. Quite naturally, the regulatory approach towards data governance focuses on data rights, consensus-based data exchange, data anonymization and aggregation, and audit-readiness. Blockchain implementation can address multiple data governance issues, including the very important one of enabling the recording of consensus-based data exchange and the abstraction of actual data through reusable digital identifiers.
While blockchain-based systems enable frictionless transactions across trust boundaries, they also allow for more transparent application of governance mechanisms relevant to the jurisdictional boundaries where services are available. Therefore, regulatory and governance issues related to data privacy, data security and data access are also addressed in a scalable manner in blockchain infrastructure.