Revera has partnered Waikato-based advanced software company Nyriad to deliver a pilot programme for New Zealand organisations to manage sensitive data using blockchain ‘digital ledger’ technology.

Unveiled today in Wellington, the pilot programme provides organisations with access to Nyriad’s real-time blockchain software platform delivered from Revera’s AoG-certified Homeland Cloud.

Heralded as the world’s first cryptographically verifiable cloud service for real-time big data applications, today’s launch follows three years of testing and development designed to provide next-generation IT platforms built on trusted architecture and massive scale.

Blockchains are inherently resistant to data modification, providing an open, distributed ledger that records transactions between two parties in a verifiable and permanent way.

Revera CEO Robin Cockayne said organisations faced growing risks as they delivered more data-rich services. While encryption had largely closed the door on criminal activity such as identity fraud and manipulation, he said blockchain technology made breaches from within or without the system all but impossible.

“Traditional data-sharing practices place a huge tax on large organisations, requiring massive resources to maintain the security and integrity of data,” said Cockayne. “Blockchain protocols are the building blocks of smart data, introducing a secure system to automate sharing when certain conditions have been met. It may even allow citizens to manage their own information kept by different organisations and service providers.”

Nyriad founder and CEO Matthew Simmons said his company’s real-time blockchain storage technology was the first platform in the world that enabled public organisations to prove they were handling information in a way that satisfied strict security standards and facilitated real-time data sharing, openness, and collaboration.

“We believe this pilot will demonstrate that IT trust can be built with our real-time Blockchain File-Systems,” he said.

Simmons said the company had fielded enquires from several European governments looking for technology that supported auditable international data exchange and inter-governmental collaboration.

He said interest in his company’s technology stemmed from EU legislation called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which aims primarily to give control back to citizens and residents over their personal data and to simplify the regulatory environment for international business by unifying the regulation within the EU.