SWOT Analysis

hyperledgerfabric
9 Oca 2020
3 dakikada okunur

SWOT analysis of block chain applicability in illegal timber trade is presented.

Digitalization through Hyperledger Fabric implementation could provide a highly transparent, non-editable system to handle decentralized big data characteristic of the forestry economy, realize Industry 4.0.

SWOT Analysis is used as a technique to help identify these needs and analyze the current situation. Goal; and taking into account the internal and external factors, taking advantage of the existing strengths and opportunities at the highest level and minimizing the impact of threats and weaknesses. It is estimated that the study will shed light on the assessment of the current situation of illegal tree felling and making decisions for the future, and decision makers at different levels will know each other's ideas clearly and contribute to the strengthening of the existing communication.

In order to start implementing this technology in the forest industry, it is necessary to identify strengths (S), weaknesses (W), opportunities (O) and threats (T) through SWOT analysis.

S and W are factors of the internal environment of the object of analysis, that is, what the object itself can affect; O and T are environmental factors, those which can affect an object from the outside and are not controlled by the object.

1- Strengths:

1) Permissioned membership

Hyperledger Fabric is a framework for permissioned networks, where all participants have known identities. When considering a permissioned network, you should think about whether your blockchain use case needs to comply with data protection regulations. Many use cases in the financial sector and healthcare industry, in particular are subject to data protection laws that require knowing who the members of the network are and who is accessing specific data.

2) Performance, scalability and levels of trust

Hyperledger Fabric is built on a modular architecture that separates transaction processing into three phases: distributed logic processing and agreement (“chaincode”), transaction ordering, and transaction validation and commitment. This separation confers several advantages: Fewer levels of trust and verification are required across node types, and network scalability and performance are optimized.

3) Data on a need to know basis

Businesses, due to competitiveness, protection laws, and regulation on confidentiality of personal data dictate the need for privacy of certain data elements, which can be achieved through data partitioning on the blockchain. Channels, supported in Hyperledger Fabric, allow for data to go to only the parties that need to know.

4) Rich queries over an immutable distributed ledger

The ledger is the sequenced record of state transitions for the blockchain application. Each transaction results in a set of asset key-value pairs that are committed to the ledger as creates, updates, or deletes.

5) Modular architecture supporting plug in components

The modularity of Hyperledger Fabric architecture enables network designers to plug in their preferred implementations for components, which is an advantage. One of the most requested areas for modularity is “bring your own identity.”

6) Protection of digital keys and sensitive data

HSM (Hardware Security Module) support is vital for safeguarding and managing digital keys for strong authentication. Hyperledger Fabric provides modified for key generation, which supports cases like identity management that need more protection.

2- Weaknesses:

1) Network fault tolerance

2) Minimum SDKs and APIs

3) Complex Architecture

4) Lack of proven use cases

5) Inadequately skilled programmers

3- Opportunities:

1) Hyperledger Composer is more suited for POC than exporting the code for testing and production.

2) Fabric states that they are in currently in works of developing and integrating BFT, it will be a while before it is ready for production use. For now, it can be implemented by adding a module with BFT for consensus, it would still require a lot of work on developing and implementing it.

3) Reduce number of nodes to be maintained to be max at three. The more types of nodes an organization maintains higher maintenance cost, the chances of failure and possibility of getting hacked also increase relatively.

4) Improve Channels by preventing chains from progressing when all organizations are not participating so integrity is maintained. Multiple Channels lead to multiple ledgers which can cause issue with data consolidation and secure maintenance. This again deviates from true concept of blockchain and Distributed Ledger.