In the first of a series exploring blockchain benefits, Rachel Baugh explores immutability: its advantages, and where and how it can be achieved. Immutability ensures data remains unaltered and undeletable, protecting against unauthorised changes and the risk of fraud or cyberattacks. Without it, even small adjustments to data can render systems inaccurate.
The average enterprise stores over 23 billion files, amounting to 10 petabytes of data – maintaining the safety, security and reliability of this data is often mission critical. So, making that data immutable hold enormous promise.
What is immutable data?
Immutable data cannot be altered, overwritten or deleted. The information exists in a secure environment, either on-premises or in the cloud. To change or delete an entry in an immutable database, a new entry must be created marked as belonging to the previous version. As a result, the history of how a database became the present state is preserved. This makes auditing data changes reliable because the audit log is tamper – resistant.
Why do businesses want to store data as immutable?
Data and how it is stored is the cornerstone of an organisation’s cybersecurity strategy. Whether it’s protecting intellectual property, safeguarding confidential information or enabling business continuity, the way data is handled and stored can significantly impact a business’s ability to protect against cyber threats.
Many organisations rely on third-party immutable databases to store sensitive information. However, the number of attacks against these technologies is on the rise. When an organisation has been hacked, it becomes difficult to trust the data within that database – and unauthorised changes can lead to monetary loss and reputational damage.
This is why many businesses are beginning to explore the possibilities of blockchain to guarantee the immutability of their data.
Is blockchain the answer?
Immutability is an intrinsic property of blockchain. Unlike a traditional database, information stored on a blockchain is stored in multiple places across different nodes. It uses a consensus mechanism to bring all nodes of a distributed blockchain network into agreement on a single data set. If any participant wants to add another portion of data, they must first get approval from the entire network.
Immutability offers several advantages for storing data:
- Integrity
Once a record has been recorded on a blockchain, it cannot be changed or removed. Immutability ensures that data remains authentic and unmodified, and that all transactions stored on chain are accurate. - Trust and transparency
Users can independently verify the integrity and authenticity of data which helps to foster trust and accountability as anyone can verify and trace the history of transactions or assets. - Security
Through cryptographic hashing and consensus mechanisms, any alternation of blockchain is easily identified which helps to enable the security of the network. - Auditability
Since information cannot be deleted, compliance and auditing are significantly easier. The blockchain’s audit trail is transparent, enabling auditors and regulators to scrutinise the history of transactions and mitigate the chances of fraud.
What industries can benefit from immutability?
Any industry that handles sensitive or confidential information would benefit from immutability. Which is to say, any industry would benefit from it.
- Financial services: Banks and other financial institutions can use immutability to secure transaction records, minimise fraud and comply with regulation.
- Healthcare: Loss of data or any downtime, can potentially impact patient outcomes. If healthcare records were to be tampered with, it could have life-threatening implications. This is why protecting patient information is so important, to avoid unauthorised changes and support healthcare providers in adhering to regulatory requirements.
- Supply chain and logistics: Immutable records can assist in accurate tracking of goods, ensuring authenticity of products and preventing tampering within a supply chain.
- Education: Using immutable databases can protect student information and educational records from unauthorised changes, as well as supporting in data integrity and privacy.
Getting started
By providing a secure, transparent, and tamper-proof foundation for a wide range of applications and industries, blockchain delivers on the promise of immutability.
Although it can be transformative, this technology requires specialist knowledge so it can also be complex and costly to implement. That’s one of the hurdles we founded Quant to overcome. Whether working with us on a project or using our Overledger platform, we make blockchain simple, trusted, and future-proof.
How Quant can help
