Blockchain and Cloud

Over the past few years, technology innovations such as cryptocurrency have filled the news. Such technologies leverage a blockchain, which you can think of a cloud-based chain of recorded, dated, unchangeable, and encrypted transactions (called blocks). Such transactions might contain information about a car purchase, a student’s transcripts, or a patient’s healthcare records. After a transaction is recorded to the blockchain, the transaction cannot be changed without impacting all the preceding transactions (blocks).

Transactions within a blockchain reside in ledgers that reside within a peer-to-peer network. Such networks can be private, such as a business-specific chain, or public, such as that required for the bitcoin currency. In the future, we should see the number of blockchain applications extend to banking, supply-chain management, health care, voting, and more.