Fake News or Data Integrity ?
An exciting topic that is currently haunting the minds of many managing directors and board members is the topic of data integrity – in other words, is my data or the data I receive really trustworthy? In contrast to data security, which is intended to ensure that data is not lost or falls into the wrong hands, data integrity is intended to document and ensure the “authenticity” of the data.
A recent report by KPMG International shows that a large majority of managers do not have a high level of trust in the way the company handles data, analyses or artificial intelligence. The fear of losing control is high and understandable.
Only 35% have confidence in the way their company uses data and analysis. 92% are concerned about the potential negative impact of data and analysis on the company’s reputation. In addition, 62% of executives said that technology functions, not executives and functional areas, are responsible when a computer or algorithm does not work properly.
It is imperative that companies ensure their data integrity so that the right business decisions can be made.
Especially in business-critical areas such as accounting or production – especially under the label “Production 4.0” and “digitization” – ensuring integrity can be a key factor for survival. In many cases, companies today are audited in these areas and must prove that the data is “genuine”, valid and unchanged.
For example, the issue of data and data integrity has become the focus of FDA inspections in the last 3-4 years. But also the classical audits increasingly focus on this topic. A PDF or XML or Edifact invoice can, of course, be subsequently modified, the technical possibilities for this are available.
Correct decisions require integrated data
If data is the “new gold”, companies need to be sure that their data is actually gold and not cat gold. Only on the basis of data whose integrity has been established can profound decisions be made. That’s why companies should make every effort to ensure integrity.
Data integrity but how?
Today’s data integrity procedures usually have two major disadvantages: Either they are costly and therefore more of a “pain-in-the-ass” for the normal user than an actual solution – and in that case they are often NOT done. Or the procedures are expensive and are therefore only used for a few selected pieces of information.
However, data integrity today affects a large amount of data from all areas of the company:
- Incoming and outgoing invoices
- orders
- offers
- Data from the production, e.g. recipes, mixing ratios, application procedures, etc.
- Delivery notes
- IoT data
- Print data
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- Tax documents
- scanned original documents
- files
- Patient data
- Log files from servers
- Patents
- SourceCodes
- Authenticity of pictures, videos, etc.
- and even more
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This requires a fast, cost-effective solution that can quickly process and “seal” a large amount of data to ensure data integrity.
Blockchain Power
The solution: Blockchain
Based on block-chain technology, we can offer you a solution that meets these criteria:
- Certified
- Fast
- Suitable for many data
- Cost-effective
Why Blockchain? The block chain meets two essential requirements in connection with data integrity: Information in the block chain cannot be changed and cannot be deleted – and is therefore an excellent basis for data integrity and for many enterprise use cases:
This means that this solution is of course GDPR (DSGVO) and tax compliant and is therefore equivalent to an advanced digital signature – only much easier and faster to handle.
And we are not the only ones who are enthusiastic and convinced – the German Federal Government has also recognized the blockchain issue for itself and has set a clear signal for the use of blockchain-based solutions with its blockchain strategy published on 18.09.2019.
How does it work?
Don’t worry, we don’t store your valuable data in the block chain, we don’t even see it …
The procedure is in principle very simple:
You create a hash value from the document that you want to seal (authenticity, immutability), pass it to us (via an appropriate API call) and we store this value in two (or more) blockchains. As soon as this process is completed, you will receive the seal from us, with which you, an auditor or your business partner can check the authenticity and validity of the document at any time. It does not matter whether it is a document, an image, a video or a line from a log file.
We neither see the document, we do not know what kind of document it is, nor is it stored somewhere in our systems or kept temporarily.
With our systems we can store the seal in up to 20 different blockchains (also private blockchains) at the same time and perform 1 million transactions per second.
Talk to us… we ensure your data integrity…