Blockchain Technology in “3D”: Data, Skills, Cybersecurity

Three dimensions to analyze the opportunities of blockchain technology-based applications

Introduction

What are the most important aspects on which all businesses today are investing or focusing their attention to define their investment strategies?

Given the dimensional characteristics of our economic and productive context, we might think of intercepting less evolved needs and requirements. Still, in reality, it is more of a less effective capacity for technological “acquisition” due to the unfortunately well-known structural problems.

Without establishing an absolute ranking, I can certainly list the three main topics now considered a must in many contexts I have interacted with. I would describe them as the three dimensions around which the main technological growth trends for blockchain applications revolve:

• Data Usage Dimension
  
• Human Resource Skills Dimension
  
• Cybersecurity Dimension

Every need to redesign, adapt, or manage business processes advanced by companies that must manage their digital transformation projects is increasingly linked to these three pillars.

Evaluating, identifying, and choosing the best IT investment opportunities to manage processes in one of these dimensions.

I will try to provide some brief food for thought on how each of these dimensions is shaping the “rules” for investment choices in many business contexts and the mutual impacts and consequences that these worlds have on the development of applications based on technologies like blockchain, capable of strengthening the balance between usability, certainty, validity, and data protection.

The focus on data is obviously inevitable because they now constitute the sole source of “vital energy,” determining both the value and the risk of what we use, communicate, and create.

The attention toward the proposed topics, coming from all analysis contexts, indicates that these worlds are revolutionizing not only the perspectives and organization of our economic system but inevitably also our habits and lifestyles.

The boundary between production and social life, between public and private, between the real and the virtual, is now very blurred and imposes complex evaluations that reflect on research, production, and applications.

Applications and technologies based on blockchain seem to have significant development in these three dimensions.
This is due to one simple common factor: the importance of data and its veracity. Protecting business information, safeguarding personal data, having data certification, and attesting to data origins.

In short, the real game is played on them.

Data Dimension: Between Security and Availability

In recent years, partly due to the pandemic, which has had a multiplying effect on the spread of applications and technologies, we have come to understand the relevance of “Information.”

And we are not so much talking about the social, cultural, and political value that information objectively has and must have but rather the intrinsic value that the extensive proliferation of data – of which “Information” is composed – has created thanks to the increasingly pervasive spread of technologies.

Protecting information as a valuable asset is not a new concept, even though it is easy to point fingers at the risks of easy manipulations from the world of social media.

The focus of the issues to be addressed always revolves around finding a balance between the opportunities and risks of technological applications.

To paraphrase the identification of historical ages, we can certainly recognize our contemporary age as the age of Data.

The recognized value of their use in multiple forms naturally attracts attention on both the opportunity and risk fronts.

Our very existence is based on data. We are recognized as such because there are data that attest to our existence, what we are, what we want to do, and what we have done.

Without the veracity of our data, we could even lose our identity.

If we think about it, this is precisely the concept on which blockchain technology was born and has developed: translating reality (physical or otherwise) into data to hide it from normal visibility.

Like the famous (or infamous) cryptocurrencies, developed through blockchain technology, every physical or conceptual element can now transform into a “virtual element.”

The paradox could be that the “virtual,” made so through data processed by blockchain systems, is also synonymous with truth, attesting that what is reproduced virtually is true.

It is mainly in the public sector that significant ferment has arisen in this regard.

Many resources from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRRN) would or could be allocated to these investments, but as we well know, the journey is far from over.

Many entities are called upon to define and implement digitalization investments mainly related to service delivery or document management: in essence, investments to manage identities, transactions, and certifications.

This is certainly a very broad and important field of application to contribute to a real structural change in our system.

What about the production contexts? Here, the focus is instead on ensuring the availability of correct, valid information that is not contaminated by various types of errors, and having the prompt and full availability to respond to the timeframes dictated by an increasingly dynamic and regulated market.

The most interesting projects and those requiring the most significant investments are often related to financial and production traceability, data analysis, and data protection.

Areas in which the principles of blockchain undeniably play a significant role.