Managing data redundancy with blockchain solutions

Introduction

Data management is very important for any business or organization today. When there is a smooth flow of data across each department, there is more efficiency. Duplication of data within an organization could lead to so much irregularities and operational difficulties. This is why data redundancy is such a big technical issue that needs to be addressed by each management team.

The blockchain continues to offer better ways of managing workflow and innovative solutions to address many inadequacies. One area that business teams could consider blockchain use is adopting it to solve data redundancy issues. Consider how that would be possible.

Data redundancy happens everywhere

Organizations battle with data redundancy and it often leads to many operational inefficiencies. So here are various instances of data redundancy across various industries and how the blockchain could be used to mitigate the challenge.

• Healthcare sector: One of the industries where data redundancy happens a lot is the healthcare sector. This is so because healthcare organizations often have various departments that a patient needs to visit in order to receive treatment. For example, a hospital visit could lead to meeting the dentist, laboratory technician and an optician. All of these are specialists inside the same hospital.

When a patient comes, he is likely admitted and given a card by the hospital reception. Then when they have to visit the dentist, this specialist would create his own record of the patient and store it in the cabinet. The patient now has a record with the hospital reception and another one with the dentist. And if they have to visit another department like the laboratory technician, they would likely have another record of the same patient.

From the example above of the healthcare institution, the same patient might end up having same records created and stored by different departments in the organization. This duplication of same data could lead to management of patient treatments or drugs. Such inefficiency in record keeping could prove fatal for example if the wrong treatments are administered to the wrong patient because their records could not be reconciled.

• In Government: The government has many agencies and parastatals that take care of various activities in the economy. The government creates and keeps records of citizens through these many agencies. For example, the government create and issues national identification documents. That requires collection and storing of user data. Each data collected in one department is stored there.

When citizens try to visit other agencies of the government of any of the services that the government provides, they might still be expected to drop their records which is essentially the same data. For example, the emigration department might collect data about each person that applied for visa. When a customer also visits a government-owned bank, they might be expected to drop their records which the financial institution also stores in their database.

At the end of the day, various government institutions might end up collecting the data of the person persons and store them each in their database. this could lead to human errors in trying to reconcile the same data across various departments of the government.

The above are just example of two sectors where data redundancy happens and it often affects how the activities of each user is handled. It could lead to mistakes and misplacement of data or other operational inefficiencies.

Eliminating data redundancy with blockchains

Blockchain technology has all the features needed to capture, store and share data in a decentralized manner. The immutable nature of blockchain technology ensures that data cannot be removed or edited after it has been written to the blockchain. This ensures that the original data stored is always retained.

Organizations that comprise of many departments could depend on the integrity of blockchain data. They are sure that any records of users found on the blockchain is genuine and could be trusted.

The ability of various departments to be able to share data across departments could be achieved through decentralization. Because a blockchain is decentralized, no one individual or department controls it absolutely. There is no central database Instead, a copy of the blockchain exists on each computer that is part of the node. This ensures that all departments could access the same data and work with them with ease.

A smart contract could be developed to help workers across departments manage the data on the blockchain. For example, only authorized persons could be allowed to add more data to a users data if they provide a private key to the smart contract.

The smart contract could also be used to query records of data stored on the blockchain so that authorized staff from each department could easily pull data from the blockchain. Smart contracts could also enable automation. That would mean that repetitive processes like updating of user records could be achieved through the smart contract.

Sometimes, data redundancy could lead to so much human error in handling records on the database. But with a smart contract, certain aspects of data management could be automated. This will completely eliminate instances of human error and each quick and efficient sharing of data across various departments from the blockchain.

Conclusion

Data redundancy is a huge issue in various organizations. If not handled correctly, it could lead to costly mistakes and operational difficulties. Organizations can look to the blockchain for efficient and innovative ways to store and manage data in order to reduce or completely eliminate instances of duplication of data in the organization.