Swedish telecom networks company Ericsson has built a system for ensuring data integrity, leveraging blockchain to underpin its growing presence in the cloud. Erik Forsgren, the company’s director for portfolio management, said that the company has had its system up and running since January. It grew out of a partnership with GuardTime, a data security startup, first inked in 2014 . The company, which dates back to the late 1800s and employs over 100,000 people worldwide, is a major player in the global telecom solutions marketplace, reporting over $6bn in second-quarter sales for this year. However, competition from China and a growing need to innovate in a fast-moving ecosystem has put the company on the defensive, pushing it to slash jobs and look to places like the cloud for new paths to growth. But Ericsson is far from alone in exploring the technology in a bid to keep data honest. Blockchains have long looked at as a means for providing a record of how data changes over time, with startups and individual developers focusing on the question of data integrity using both the bitcoin blockchain and other implementations. The state of Vermont even passed legislation earlier this year to provide a legal basis for blockchain-based information after toying with the idea of developing a record-keeping system that uses the technology (which was ultimately scuttled). It’s an area that has also attracted interest in the banking sector as well. Forsgren explained that someone using the system is signing “fingerprints” of data, an approach that allows for efficient processing while still maintaining a mechanism for ensuring that information is timestamped and recorded whenever any change happens. He told CoinDesk in a recent interview: “What we are doing is running this global blockchain infrastructure. It is a private blockchain that you can […]
