By Dr. Tim Wagner, Co-founder and CEO of Vendia

As the world of commerce accelerates, the demand for accessing and sharing data in real time has become a necessity. However, getting data where it belongs-and securely sharing it with the parties that need it-is one of the most enduring and foundational challenges for IT professionals regardless of their organization's size or industry. Yet when organizations can securely share time-sensitive, operational and business critical information with third parties, they are better at making timely and innovative business decisions-decisions that benefit users and ultimately, the company's bottom line. 

Think about a product moving through a supply chain. As the product is handed off to the next step, the data associated with it is updated. It's necessary for everyone involved to be able to know-and trust-the latest updates and status of this product at all times so they can mitigate errors, plan ahead, replenish inventory, reconcile payments, and increase productivity and efficiency at every stage of the journey.

Whether it is a good making its way through the supply chain, a passenger boarding a plane, or a mortgage application being processed - every party needs to have full visibility into the entirety of the journey in order for real-time data sharing to be valuable. When done effectively, real-time data sharing has the ability to bring businesses timely insights, more efficient processes and better partnerships.

As anyone who works with data will tell you - access, trust, volume, and speed requirements make all the difference in how data sharing is managed effectively. Unfortunately, too many IT teams today lack the tools needed to deploy meaningful real-time data sharing solutions. The result is that they are stuck with processes that are time-consuming, difficult, and expensive to build and maintain. And these processes become slow and untrustworthy, painful and expensive manual reconciliation mechanisms become needed - it's a destructive spiral.

Next generation blockchains offer a compelling way forward. They bring a game-changing combination of cloud + blockchain technology to organizations that make it fast and scalable to share business data across applications, clouds and numerous partners, all in real-time and on a single platform. Next gen blockchains can ease real-time data sharing in the following ways:

• Serving as a single source of truth

Next generation blockchains have the ability to reconcile data at all times, ensuring that only correct and up-to-date data appears on everyone's ledger. Every transaction and change is recorded on everyone's ledger in the same order, giving everyone visibility into current and past states of data, as well as who changed it and when. This transparency allows full visibility for everyone and even makes it possible to audit prior transactions to settle disputes or gain other insights.

• Providing secure data exchanges

Another benefit of the blockchain model is that users can tightly control what data is shared so that only approved parties can access certain information. This significantly reduces the risk of sharing intellectual property or sensitive data unintentionally, without taking away from the speed and efficiency that real-time access provides.

• Access to infinite cloud computing

Unlike first generation blockchains like Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric, nextgen blockchain technology is powered by the cloud and delivered as a serverless SaaS. This means that unlimited data storage and compute capacity is available on-demand with the majority of costs based on actual usage. This not only helps support ongoing, real-time data sharing across parties, but also ensures it won't break the bank as usage ebbs and flows over time.

In 2022, 80% of business data lives outside a company's 4 walls. That means that to survive, and certainly to thrive, businesses need to become great at sharing data across multiple parties all in real-time. By deploying next generation blockchain technology, companies can utilize the game-changing combination of cloud and blockchain for more efficient and innovative data sharing.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Tim Wagner, co-founder and CEO of Vendia

Tim Wagner is the co-founder and CEO of Vendia, a Series B startup at the forefront of next-generation blockchain and serverless infrastructure. Holding a PhD in Computer Science from Berkeley, Tim worked at Amazon Web Services for five years as a General Manager where he invented AWS Lambda, helping pave the way for early serverless infrastructure. After AWS, he joined Coinbase as VP of Engineering. At Coinbase, he helped create the world's most open, secure, and accessible financial system.