Sixgill launches Integrity 1.0 for blockchain-enforced data authenticity

Sixgill, a leader in data automation and authenticity products and services, announced the commercial launch of Sixgill Integrity 1.0 for blockchain-enforced data authenticity.

Sixgill Integrity fulfills the critical enterprise need for end-to-end, real-time data authenticity assurance with robust capabilities to monitor and guarantee the veracity of any data stream, including today’s sensors emitting time-series data in any form.

Integrity provides organizations with absolute assurance that the data they create, transmit, process, act on, and store remains unchanged and tamperproof throughout its lifecycle.

In short, Integrity ensures that organizations – including their stakeholders, regulators, clients and others – can truly trust their data, particularly for high-stakes data automation applications.

Blockchain is too slow to achieve real-time operational performance for most mission critical use cases if all the data must flow through the blockchain. Sixgill chose a hybrid, on-chain/off-chain architecture.

Integrity ensures that organizations will benefit from the unparalleled security, transparency and immutability of private and public blockchain networks, while using off-chain capabilities for storing, processing, verifying and safely operationalizing vast amounts of data.

Use cases for Sixgill’s new blockchain-secured data authenticity solution span a wide range of industries and needs, including these:

• Healthcare: Permanent auditability, traceability and certainty required for regulatory-grade medical and clinical trial data records
• Supply chain: Immutable data evidence of authenticity of goods origin and permanent traceability to originating data source(s)
• FinTech: Unalterable transaction records for permanent audit trails
• Utilities: Backbone data integrity for widely distributed infrastructures enabling centrally managed, system-wide programmatic actions triggered by device, data, and contextual rules for operating on data truth
• Insurance: Verified data lifecycle authenticity from smart devices, smart homes, sensor-intensive vehicles, smart buildings, etc. for rate setting and claim settling
• Video surveillance: Permanent data immutability and auditability for tamperproof video data streams with configurable alerting to any tampering

Integrity’s benefits are already being realized in the healthcare industry. New York and Austin-based Litmus Health – an early pilot adopter – uses Sixgill Integrity in its end-to-end data science platform for clinical research to ensure the immutability of clinical trial data.

“We needed to be able to provide sponsors and, ultimately, the FDA, with an ironclad lineage for their data,” says Dr. Samuel Volchenboum, Chief Medical Officer for Litmus Health. “Implementation of Sixgill Integrity helps ensure that all data is collected, stored and analyzed in an immutable, trackable and auditable way,” says Dr. Volchenboum.

For industries that rely on audit trails, Integrity provides a vital solution for compliance support and defense against data breaches involving electronic records.

This can include health information and clinical research data, as well as financial, accounting and billing records, manufacturing design controls, ecommerce sales, IT helpdesk records, university student records, quality assurance and control, 3-D printing and CNC instruction sets, and even voting records.

“In today’s highly digitized and data-intensive world, ensuring the authenticity and integrity of data has become a mission critical concern,” says Phil Ressler, CEO of Sixgill.

“Any data compromise whatsoever can have disastrous business, operational, legal, regulatory, or even life-threatening consequences. Sixgill Integrity improves on the unrivaled integrity of blockchain by adding in real-time operational speed and scale that today’s organizations require.”

Sixgill Integrity 1.0 technical details

Integrity stands apart from other data security offerings in that it combines the maximum-integrity properties of distributed ledger technology (DLT) with the speed of a modern distributed data system.

This is made possible by Integrity’s unique on-chain/off-chain architecture that marries the immutability of private and public blockchains with an off-chain data layer that preserves real-time performance at scale.

By combining DLT and (where possible) Edge computing, Integrity is able to use blockchain and cryptography to completely authenticate data origin and verify data content and chronology.

Sixgill Integrity 1.0 provides organizations with:

• End-to-end data lifecycle immutability
• Permanent and continuous regulatory-grade data auditability
• A powerful, fully configurable rules engine that can define and trigger actions
• Full functionality that is data-, device-, and ledger-agnostic
• A comprehensive dashboard for rules and operations monitoring, with real-time analytics
• Automated real-time alerts of any data compromise
• Device authenticity validation
• Deployment to single tenant private clouds or custom on-premise deployment
• SaaS version coming in 2020

Data integrity is an emerging enterprise necessity

The need for data security and authentication has never been greater. The continued rapid expansion of data processing in the cloud makes these complex networks ever more vulnerable to intrusions, while the proliferation of connected devices vastly expands the attack vectors into device networks.

Sixgill regards networks as indefensible and assumes bad actors can and will get into any system. Sixgill sees data itself as defensible, with Integrity the result.

Data streams exploding from the Internet of Everything (IoE) can be tampered with, hacked or changed without even the most diligent organizations ever knowing – or not knowing soon enough to avert severe damage. Sixgill Integrity provides the data security backstop that today’s organizations so desperately need.