Acronis, a Singapore-based data security and protection company, has announced a new strategic initiative to develop blockchain applications for data protection, at its 2016 VIP Partner Summit held in Singapore this week. 

IT Brief reported that the company has formed a research and deployment team that will initially focus on delivering ‘tamper-proof’ data storage with verifiable sync and share solutions based on blockchain technology to guarantee data authenticity, privacy and control.

Blockchain technology, that underpins digital currencies such as bitcoin, is nothing but a distributed ledger that records digital events distributed across different participants or entitites. It has the potential to unlock a broad range of new data protection use cases across multiple industries.

“You can use Blockchain technology to essentially timestamp them, and then that way you can guarantee that they haven’t been touched,” said John Zanni, Acronis chief marketing officer. “That way if someone does touch it, it will be stamped again and you will have a log of these modifications. The interesting part is instead of having a centralised entity, that is the source of the verification/certification, it is distributed. It becomes very tamper-resistant, because you would have to go to a set of 50 Blockchain authorities and somehow get all of them to not notice that you’ve made a change – which is why it’s getting a lot of hype in the market.”

Acronis is taking a ‘unique and targeted’ approach to use blockchain technology for solving specific data protection problems by exploring and developing use cases that exist today, IT Brief noted. To facilitate constant monitoring of data integrity and guaranteeing validity, the company is currently extending its data storage solutions and file sync and share solutions with blockchain technology.

"When harnessed to its full potential, blockchain will bring levels of data authenticity, privacy, and control to data protection that we have not seen before”, ZDNet quoted Acronis Co-founder and CEO Serguei Beloussov.