Are clients beginning to demand continuity, even in the face of disruption so severe as to potentially undermine the continuity of any hosting service, no matter how large?
Even the biggest clouds aren’t completely safe
If your app is truly decentralised, then even if all the leading cloud hosting services are down, your app will still be running and accessible by your clients, because decentralised apps use the Internet itself as their hosting service and the Internet is far more fault-tolerant than any hosting service which runs on it.
The safest cloud is the Internet itself
But if your online service is only designed to run as a conventional client server-solution, then even if it is being hosted on a supposedly highly fault-tolerant cloud, it is ultimately dependent upon an infrastructure which is inherently less reliable than the Internet as a whole and whose ability to withstand disruption now stands a good chance of being tested and may well be found wanting.
The future of IT risk mitigation is decentralisation
The challenge this poses for most enterprises is to address a requirement to migrate their existing client-server based apps (and their associated IT infrastructure) to a truly ‘decentralised app’ or DApp platform, where the perils of exclusive dependence upon any proprietary hosting services no longer pose an existential risk to their services.
Accepting Bitcoin payments: embracing Blockchain? Yes. Decentralisation? Not so much.
Whilst many organisations have taken their first tentative steps into the decentralised space by embracing sufficient Blockchain technology to accommodate Bitcoin and other digital currencies as a means of payment, the prospect of fully migrating their entire online services to a decentralised infrastructure using Blockchain may look like being a much more daunting undertaking.
Nobody uses IT resilience or operational continuity as a leading argument for Blockchain projects
In exploring the field of Blockchain migration, I have yet to encounter any examples of organisations who have taken client concerns over continuity as a spur for them to implement real decentralisation.
A global health crisis could move IT continuity to the top of the agenda
Nonetheless, with the current health crisis-based disruption uppermost in everyone’s mind, giving urgent consideration to crucial new options that address unprecedented challenges to IT continuity is something that can no longer be summarily dismissed as being unreasonably paranoid, excessive, or unrealistic.
Even those organisations taking Blockchain seriously aren’t prioritising decentralisation
A large number of institutions and businesses have recognised potential opportunities opened up by Blockchain-related benefits other than resilience. Such high-profile Blockchain benefits include traceability, transparency, identity protection, authentication, auditability and disintermediation.
Blockchain apps are primarily justified on the basis of ‘non-resilience-based benefits’
The inherent resilience conferred by Blockchain’s decentralised nature, while inevitably included in the business case for a Blockchain project, is typically relegated to being presented as a highly valuable but nonetheless subsidiary, incidental and supplemental benefit.
Whether or not Blockchain is on your agenda, concern over online continuity may now put it there
It turns out that whilst those other benefits of Blockchain may, at first sight appear to present the resiliency issue as “just one benefit among many”, there is now a growing likelihood that continuity concerns could become a widespread basis for considering decentralised apps as a high priority risk mitigation strategy, rather than just a fresh opportunity to improve the quality and range of services.
I’d love to hear your views on this
Please come and talk to me if you are interested in anything to do with Blockchain Migration (or any other kind of decentralisation-based issue). Email [email protected] website http://comgen.co.uk