NewVoiceMedia, an England-based cloud service company has recently won a blockchain cloud security patent. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has awarded the patent to them on March 12th 2019.
The patent assumes significance as it demonstrates how blockchain can positively impact the highly powerful cloud computing space. It touches upon the communication-security aspect in cloud computing.
Cloud computing already has a massive market, moreover, the growth potential is high. The global cloud services market value was $209.9 billion in 2014. It’s expected to reach a whopping $555 billion by 2020, translating to a 17.6% CAGR, as experts forecast.
Industry experts find that organizations can save up to 35% of their annual operating cost by deploying cloud computing services effectively. The various categories of deployment are public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud.
Public cloud offers services using shared infrastructure. Entrepreneurs don’t need to invest in IT infrastructure. They can consume public cloud services, and build-and-operate their apps. This costs less, however, shared infrastructure can be less secure.
Private cloud either uses on-premises IT infrastructure or has a dedicated infrastructure for an organization. It’s more expensive, however, the security is high. Hybrid cloud has a bit of both, to address different kinds of business requirements.
Public cloud has staggering growth prospects, as industry-watchers forecast! The revenue forecast for 2019 is $258 billion, and for 2027, it’s $552 billion!
The industry has work to do before realizing this potential, though. There is a need to address cloud computing security challenges, as follows:
- DDoS attacks;
- Data breaches;
- Data loss;
- Insecure access points;
- Notifications and alerts.
As explained earlier, there are security risks even in backing up data with cloud providers since the provider holds the encryption key.
Blockchain cloud security solution to the rescue
Blockchain cloud security solutions could play an important part in improving the security capabilities of cloud service providers. Blockchain offers decentralization, security, and immutable records on distributed ledgers.
This is where the patent from NewVoiceMedia comes into the picture. The company plans to use blockchain in secure communications and recordings.
Their proposed solution will use blockchain to record interactions in a tamper-proof manner. The time stamping entries of these recordings will also be immutable, thanks to blockchain.
The company plans to use their proposed solution for secure recording of phone calls and other voice communications. A decentralized blockchain network will form the backbone of their system.
As the decentralized ledger of blockchain will underpin the entire solution, it’s obvious that NewVoiceMedia could extend it more use cases. For e.g., creating secure files, providing secure storage, and user authentication could be the other use cases.
The database will support both physical or logical storage. An authentication server will ensure the validity of the communication. Digital signatures are also part of the proposed solution.
Decentralized blockchain networks ensure security using their consensus algorithm and distributed nodes. From the available information, it appears that the NewVoiceMedia patent application intends to use this approach to decentralization.
A promising intersection between cloud computing and blockchain
Basingstoke, England-based NewVoiceMedia is owned by Vonage, a cloud communications company based out of England. Their blockchain cloud security patent could prove valuable to public cloud service providers since it addressed the security challenges. This could accelerate the growth of public cloud.
