As per Gartner, one of the four blockchain business initiatives that are cost-effective and generates revenue is record management. The technology has great potential for bettering the record management processes and ballooning their capabilities. It also claims to better secure and verify the intellectual property with higher efficiency and lower cost.

Securing government records is a complex and difficult task. The amount of data breaches has been raised by more than 400% last year, exposing nearly 15 billion records, as per 4iQ, an identity intelligence company.

The average cost of these security breaches added up to $17 million. Officials revealed that after the databases at the Office of Personnel Management had been breached in 2015, the hackers had access to personally identifiable information of about 22 million individuals, in terms of employment history, financial data, social security numbers, and even fingerprints. 

It is necessary for government records to be protected while also ensuring that the parties can transact with as much privacy and confidentiality as possible. they should be able to access data only when they need to, although this is clearly easier said than done.

A failure at any point in the centralized databases can make them vulnerable to cost security breaches. Digital signature technologies that have the ability to fix this are often expensive, and the certificates are hard to get. Moreover, the impartiality of third-party intermediaries becomes a concern. 

Besides this, government records should also be stores to ensure compliance of regulation, and it should be assured by the organizations that there has been no presence of malicious or negligent corruption of information.

Records integrity through blockchain

Blockchain helps create as well as store cryptographical hash that can be used as a data reference check against a record, its signatures, and workflow. The hash stops working if any of the same is changed, therefore, it is immutable. Blockchain has potential and is attractive to litigators and auditors because it successfully certifies data that is corrupt-free.

It is advised for government blockchain systems to use a private licensed DLT and not a public blockchain for recording personally identifiable data. Information that is stored on the blockchain is accessible to everyone on a public ledger.

Moreover, the public blockchain network is not permissioned, which helps it carry out transactions pseudonymously. This makes it difficult to identify the parties to their correspondent transactions. 

Smart contracts

With the help of smart contracts, organizations can carry out transactions of a legal agreement as a software on the blockchain network. It is necessary for smart contracts to be synchronized or reconciled with its digital record. Contract experts and professionals (like auditors and lawyers) should be able to read and understand smart contracts, if not be able to write them.

Record management via blockchain will soon become the next era of secure, transparent and fraud-free complaint processes. It will enable the synchronization of workflow, records and signatures for contract records for various parties.