In the famous essay "The Art of War", still among the most popular books among CEOs around the world, Sun Tzu argued that the best defense is "one that makes the opponent unable to understand where to attack." It is incredible. Blockchain technology, best known for being born with cryptocurrencies, is based exactly on this principle, formulated by a Chinese general and philosopher who lived 2500 years ago. To defend a system, you need to dilute it. To strengthen it, you have to decentralize it, distributing the data power to multiply the system seals. By managing and owning the information in a widespread, "democratic" and transparent manner, it is possible to have a better protection.

Simultaneous, horizontal and transparent data management

Blockchain, as it is known, is a distributed and decentralized database: database nodes record new transactions and validate the previous ones using a rapid and secure validation system, creating a consistent, verified and verifiable "chain of transactions". This way, different devices, located at different points of the chain, can simultaneously handle the same process and update it. Transparency comes from the fact that the system is "trustless", no one has to rely on a specific authority for the system to function. Blockchain management is public and distributed across all the nodes that are part of the network, not on a single central authority validating the modifications, as it happens in traditional databases or (considering killer-applications of cryptocurrencies) in traditional currencies managed by central banks. Since the operation is de facto in the hands of the “network” components, in order to manipulate information in a blockchain-based system, most of the nodes of the system would need to be "hacked”: the widespread ownership of the process automatically implies a widespread control, each transaction is immutable, irreversible and replicated over the various nodes of the system.

A driver of digital transformation for Public Administration
Blockchain has an incredible amount of application opportunities, e.g. business, food, agriculture, environment, cybersecurity, public administration. It is an important driver of digital transformation for many industries. This happens because blockchain is perfectly importable in any system where data drives the operations, and in which operations are structured on a subsequent approval process, independent of individual physical media. Its impact on data management processes in Public Administrations around the world is particularly disruptive. All public records regarding payments or acts are particularly suitable to adopt the blockchain. This technology gives shared archives the ability to be managed and updated simultaneously in a decentralized and perfectly secure way: it is a functional model importable in the many administrative areas where databases have to be accessible and editable by multiple independent entities of the system. Moreover, adopting blockchain, adding new blocks and integrating the infrastructure with new data sets becomes easier. The Public Administrations of Estonia, Georgia, Sweden, UK, Belarus, France, Canada, South Korea, Australia are already thinking about implementing the blockchain technology for their data management process.

The Sunfish formula: federate the cloud with the blockchain

Among the pioneers of blockchain adoption there is also the Italian Public Administration. Thanks to the adoption of the cloud management paradigm in the European Sunfish project, the Ministry of the Economy and Finance has developed a secure and proven sensitive data management system and created an automated salary management process. This paradigm will soon be extended to the entire "life cycle" of the public employee processes. The formula developed by Sunfish is the FaaS, Federation as a service: federating clouds with a blockchain-based recording system. The federated cloud provided by Sunfish offers the automated creation of the underlying components, an administrative console for managing and viewing the Service Level Agreement and the security alerts, a distributed data monitoring infrastructure, a surveillance system intercepting anomalies and vulnerabilities, an architecture with distributed sealing points connecting data transformation services to a set of storage, data release, and calculation processes. It is a dynamic solution that makes the federation of multiple clouds and of their services possible in a secure environment for privacy and sensitive data management. Blockchain in the FaaS formula integrates low-level and high-level infrastructures without the need for a central validation authority, enables a democratic and distributed governance, and strengthens the integrity, reliability and availability of the system.

The prophecy of Satoshi Nakamoto

The paternity of blockchain and cryptocurrencies is attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto, although it is not sure whether this name represents a person or a collective. According to one of his most famous quotes: "With digital currency based on cryptographic evidence, money can be safe and transactions can be fluid without having to rely on a third-party broker." Such an efficacy and collective responsibility based approach can generate significant benefits in many areas.