IoT Data Needs Blockchain, Decentralization, Startup Says

By leveraging blockchain technology and decentralized computing, one IoT startup aims to ease the management of IoT data, with a larger vision of enabling a Google-like interface to search it. AnyLog’s technology would enable the creation of a marketplace for servicing IoT data, where “data owners” put their IoT data storage and management needs out to bid, so to speak, to a network of “data operators,” who compete to offer SLAs, according to Moshe Shadmon, founder and chief executive officer of AnyLog. Contracts between the parties are stored on a blockchain, so there is no centralized authority. One big gain for IoT data owners, according to Shadmon, is the resultant ease of complexity and reduced cost associated with managing IoT data. Processing data at the edge of the network leads to the complexity of managing hundreds of tiny data centers, while the cost of sending IoT data to the cloud sometimes negates the value the enterprise gets from the data itself.