Blockchain deployment is still gathering steam, but cloud providers are already moving to offer it as an enterprise service. That could help companies who don’t want to take on the expense of a new architecture or find developers to deploy and maintain it.
As enterprises look to deploy distributed ledgers, the industry’s largest IT providers have launched blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS), offering a way to test the nascent technology without the cost or risk of deploying it in-house.
The BaaS offerings could help companies who don’t want to build out new infrastructure or try to find in-house developers, which are in hot demand.
“The thing to be thinking about is that we’re still in the early innings of this blockchain wave,” said Bill Fearnley Jr., IDC’s research director for Worldwide Blockchain Strategies. “There are very few people with multiple years of deep, hands-on experience.”
While heavily hyped, blockchain technology – which gained its initial notoriety from bitcoin cryptocurrency – has the potential to offer a new paradigm for the way information is shared; tech vendors and companies are rushing to figure out how they can use the distributed ledger technology to save time and admin costs.
BaaS offerings are particularly attractive because many enterprises can look to their current cloud providers to offer them use of the nascent technology.
“As with any new technology, there is a learning curve as enterprise customers put it into production,” Fearnley said. “One advantage of partnering with a BaaS provider is users can leverage the lessons learned by the provider to help make their systems more secure.”
BaaS providers are also acting as consultants on the technology, Fearnley said.
