Blockchain provides a distributed, secure, and unique system of records

ManageEngine, the IT Management division of Zoho Corp., as a thought leader in the enterprise technology space, comments on some of the significant technology trends for 2018. Sridhar Iyengar, VP of the company, comments:

Growing use of artificial intelligence, machine learning with data analytics, and business intelligence: Business applications continue to churn out large volumes of data, and users are trying to mine that data to determine patterns and predict user behavior. In ecommerce, users want to know customers’ buying patterns, which will help market products better. Website designers want to understand how visitors move through their sites in order to improve conversion rates.

Companies want to analyze their sales data to correlate marketing dollars spent with sales dollars generated. Business intelligence and data analytics activities are becoming easier to perform, and that’s driving their adoption in mainstream businesses that are seeking to make better, faster decisions.

Rise of AI-powered chatbots in customer service and support. Over the past few years, chatbots — the automated, human-like chat responders — have been more an experiment, with limited adoption. Now, chatbots are becoming more mainstream as people see the benefits of those experiments, especially in customer service and support. Unlike human customer service and support reps, chatbots don’t have the physical and mental inconsistencies that can degrade service levels.

More, AI-powered chatbots are learning how to respond to customers and predict what they want. Based on customer history or questions customers ask during a chat session, AI-powered chatbots can ask users what they need and even ask leading questions, all to improve the support experience.

Tightening of data protection laws. Everything is heading towards digitization. Every business process, every technology, everything done with information — from storing, transmitting, and processing it —-it’s all in digital form. Now, a lot of countries are recognizing that their citizens’ personal data needs to be protected.

More, they’re recognizing that users have to opt-in to these digital relationships; and they have to know the reason their personal data is being provided to a data process or data consumer and know what the consumer will do with their data.

Tighter data protection laws are designed to secure their citizens’ privacy as well as prevent data abuse and outright criminal activity such as fraud or theft. Most recent example of this is Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). While some countries like India are also coming up with data protection frameworks, others will enhance their current data protection framework.

Use of Blockchain in enterprise security for identity management. Blockchain provides a distributed, secure, and unique system of records, so you can have a strongly encrypted authentication mechanism that prevents malicious users from breaking in. This makes it a great choice in terms of enterprise security, especially for identity access management system, which manages user logins and authentication.

In 2018, we’ll like start seeing Blockchain adoption in areas such as banking, financial services, and health care.