Blockchain meets Mac ‘n Cheese

Blockchain and the cloud go together like organic macaroni and cheese. What’s the connection? Choosy shoppers would like to know that their organic food is tracked from farm to shelf, to make sure they’re getting what’s promised on the label. Blockchain provides an immutable ledger perfect for tracking cheese, for example, as it goes from dairy to cheesemaker to distributor to grocer.

Oracle’s new Blockchain Cloud Service provides a platform for each participant in a supply chain to register transactions. Within that blockchain, each participant—and regulators, if appropriate—can review those transactions to ensure that promises are being kept, and that data has not been tampered with. Use cases range from supply chains and financial transactions to data sharing inside a company.

Launched this month, Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service has the features that an enterprise needs to move from experimenting with blockchain to creating production applications. It addresses some of the biggest challenges facing developers and administrators, such as mastering the peer-to-peer protocols used to link blockchain servers, ensuring resiliency and high availability, and ensuring that security is solid. For example, developers previously had to code one-off integrations using complex APIs; Oracle’s Blockchain Cloud Service provides integration accelerators with sample templates and design patterns for many Oracle and third-party applications in the cloud and running on-premises in the data center.

Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service provides the kind of resilience, recoverability, security, and global reach that enterprises require before they’d trust their supply chain and customer experience to blockchain. With blockchain implemented as a managed cloud service, organizations also get a system that’s ready to be integrated with other enterprise applications, and where Oracle handles the back end to ensure availability and security.

Read more about this in my story for Forbes, “Oracle Helps You Put Blockchain Into Real-World Use With New Cloud Service.”