Making the world's information universally reliable
Photo: Publicitiy Photo of Guardtime
Guardtime is the world's largest provider of cybersecurity solutions based on blockchain systems. The company's technology aims to confirm the correctness of digital data. Silver Kelk, Business Development Manager at Guardtime, explained to Baltic Business Quarterly how this works and in what fields the technology can be used.
What is your core business? What are the most popular products you have developed?
Guardtime’s core mission is to make information universally reliable. Probably, our most well-known product, or actually a core technology, is a unique blockchain that enables the users to verify the accuracy and integrity of any digital information. Unlike any of the alternatives, we can do this with minimal operational overheads and at the scale of billions of transactions per second.
In other words, Guardtime has created the ability to sign and verify every step that is performed using data – medical records, software configuration files, vaccines shipment documentation, and so on – in its longer lifecycle, even when the data crosses organizational and geographical boundaries. By combining such signatures into an unbreakable chain of events, we get a trustworthy report of the digital supply chain, or provenance as we like to call it. This way, we help to reduce the need to build trust into such data and its related real-world assets by other expensive and time-consuming means like manual checks, auditing or overly complex contracting.
Since the early market traction with the Estonian government, we’ve built industry- and client-specific solutions on top of this powerful core technology, racking up quite an impressive reference list over the years. We have helped governments and enterprises, like Lockheed Martin, Ericsson, Verizon, Maersk and many others, to bring more trust, security, and accountability into their digital information flows and services.
In most of these cases, Guardtime’s technology has been a critical, yet often invisible, building block that is embedded in the backend of bigger systems. However, in the last few years, we have taken a more product-oriented approach and are now focusing on commercializing more value-adding and user-centric solutions that are often built in close collaboration with industry partners. Great examples of this are our marine insurance platform Insurwave (e.g. used by Maersk) and real-world healthcare data solutions (developed with Roche and AstraZeneca).