Backup and recovery software company Acronis has announced an initiative to develop Blockchain technology-based applications for data protection.
According to journalist Ashton Young from IT Brief, out of New Zealand, The company announced the initiative at its 2016 VIP Partner Summit held in Singapore this week.
Acronis has formed a dedicated research and deployment team that is initially focused on delivering ‘tamper-proof’ data storage with verifiable sync and share solutions that leverage Blockchain to guarantee data authenticity, privacy and control. The ground-breaking Blockchain technology, which provides a record of digital events distributed across different participants or entitites, has the potential to open up a broad range of new data protection use cases for businesses and organisations worldwide.
Young interviewed John Zanni, Acronis’ chief marketing officer:
Acronis is taking a unique and targeted approach at how Blockchain can be used to solve specific data protection problems by seeking and developing use cases that exist today. Data and transactions that are protected from tampering by Blockchain can be used for those use cases where individuals or businesses absolutely must maintain the integrity of the original information.
While it can be a bit to get your head around, Zanni provides the example of Police officer footage, as most police officers are now equipped with shoulder and car cams and it is vital to preserve the integrity of these video clips.
“You can use Blockchain technology to essentially timestamp them, and then that way you can guarantee that they haven’t been touched,” Zanni says. “That way if someone does touch it, it will be stamped again and you will have a log of these modifications. The interesting part is instead of having a centralised entity, that is the source of the verification/certification, it is distributed. It becomes very tamper-resistant, because you would have to go to a set of 50 Blockchain authorities and somehow get all of them to not notice that you’ve made a change – which is why it’s getting a lot of hype in the market.”
