2.4 Blockchain Technology, Cloud Differences and Blockchain as a Service

What are the benefits of blockchain technology?

Faster auditing

Enterprises must be able to securely generate, exchange, archive, and reconstruct e-transactions in an auditable manner. Blockchain records are chronologically immutable, which means that all records are always ordered by time. This data transparency makes audit processing much faster.

What is the difference between a database and a blockchain?

Blockchain is a special type of database management system that has more features than a regular database. We describe some significant differences between a traditional database and a blockchain in the following list:

• Blockchains decentralize control without damaging trust in the existing data. This is not possible in other database systems.
• Companies involved in a transaction cannot share their entire database. But in blockchain networks, each company has its copy of the ledger, and the system automatically maintains consistency between the two ledgers.
• Although in most database systems you can edit or delete data, in blockchain you can only insert data.

How is blockchain different from the cloud?

The term cloud refers to computing services that can be accessed online. You can access Software as a Service (SaaS), Product as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from the cloud.

Cloud providers manage their hardware and infrastructure and give you access to these computing resources over the internet. They provide many more resources than just database management.

If you want to join a public blockchain network, you need to provide your hardware resources to store your ledger copy. You could use a server from the cloud for this purpose too. Some cloud providers also offer complete Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) from the cloud.

What is blockchain as a service?

Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) is a managed blockchain service that a third party provides in the cloud. You can develop blockchain applications and digital services while the cloud provider supplies the infrastructure and blockchain building tools.

All you have to do is customize existing blockchain technology, which makes blockchain adoption faster and more efficient.