Mobile phone subscribers can hope to have some serious respite from pesky calls and messages, the war against which is being now being taken to the next technological level. Bharti Airtel has awarded a multi-million-dollar contract to US technology major IBM to deploy a blockchain-based pan India network which will allow the telco to protect its 284 million subscribers from pesky calls and messages, two persons familiar with the matter said.
Sanchit Vir Gogia, founder of Greyhound Research, said that, “Blockchain has been particularly valuable in verticals with no common standards and regulatory frameworks and has helped bring in transparency to create trust between governments, organisations and citizens. Having said that, as per our ongoing market tracking, 7 in 10 Global organisations that are currently undertaking pilots are worried about scalability, deployment flexibility and security.
IBM among its peers including Oracle, Microsoft, Infosys and others has made a solid attempt at Blockchain by way of establishing industry partnerships to build industry-specific relevance. This partnership in specific with Airtel, will be a good showcase of IBM’s technology prowess in the space combined with its ability to solve on the ground implementation issues by way of onboarding an expert partner.
Having said that, IBM must solve possible security issues that are core to a blockchain implementation like man-in-the-middle attacks, eclipse attack where node-to-node communication can be tampered among other threats. Separately, what IBM and others in the Blockchain provider community must also figure out is to help organisations navigate the practical challenges with Blockchain implementation including legacy code in infrastructure, lack of industry solutions and most importantly lack of complete ownership by one vendor in the event of a cybersecurity attack. Truth be told, no provider (including IBM) is ready just yet to solve these issues in totality.”
Analyst:
Sanchit Vir Gogia: Sanchit is the Chief Analyst, Founder & CEO of Greyhound Research, a Global, Award-Winning, Technology & Innovation Research & Advisory firm. To read more about him, click here.
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