Private enterprise blockchains
Imagine you just got a new job. During onboarding, you are given a crypto address that serves as your digital corporate identity. You will use it to sign into your department’s applications.
Your company has adopted a private enterprise blockchain as its comprehensive source-of-truth.
This world is not so far off. Salesforce, the modern nucleus of the business application economy, is a dinosaur, and digital identity management is undergoing a UX crisis.
Combine the explosion in sheer quantity of applications with the need for simplicity, security, and scalability in the enterprise, and we’ll eventually need a better solution for a source of truth and way to manage identities.
SaaS vendors will have to turn into open-source dapp providers. Decentralized software as a service.
dSaaS vendors will continue recurring revenue models by offering different levels of access to their code repo and support services, rather than restricting access to special rows of their db.
While laggards are paying vendors for cloud-based SaaS apps, the smartest companies will be self-deploying those same services as dapps on their own private blockchains. Off-chain applications cannot offer the same levels of visibility and sovereignty.
The build vs buy debate is coming to a close. One BizApp developer can add the same value to an enterprise as millions of dollars worth of well-procured productivity software.
Developer tools are simultaneously becoming more powerful and more beginner-friendly. Low-code solutions like Zapier and Appsmith are blowing the doors open for scrappy, custom solutions that cost far less than buying some sleek SaaS from San Francisco. That kind of solution is great when you can afford it. Until an IT department is flush with cash, build is better in the medium run. Buying is always an option.
Importing and modifying an application to work on your private blockchain will be a more efficient, transparent, and simple way of managing enterprise architecture.
Will blockchains kill the enterprise cloud? In a way. Users shouldn’t have to ‘do’ anything related to the cloud unless they work close to network hardware. All activity should be inextricably tied to a corporate crypto-identity, and all the heavy lifting should happen behind the scenes. Instead of having the users pay for services like a traditional dapp, the company can subsidize network usage costs.
Digital identity is key to dapps. It will not be stored in a remote cloud, but rather on a distributed ledger that makes it immutable and secures access to internal applications.
Give employees a browser with a baked-in wallet, and streamline the UX so that all apps are immediately accessible and linked to their wallet address before they even onboard.
The best part is, all of this technology already exists in open standards like ERC-725. The hurdle to adoption here is the absolute lack of options for useful workplace dapps and insufficient tech support for widely adoptable private blockchains.
It is important for companies to take responsibility for their own data sovereignty and security as we move towards this future, and not rely on a centralized cloud provider to do it for them. Private enterprise blockchains would be a step in this direction.
The large majority of dapps right now are arcane DeFi projects ‘by developers, for developers.’ We have yet to see the dawn of the day of enterprise dapps.
