While it is a newer technology, blockchain is already disrupting financial services, insurance, healthcare and supply chain solutions. Two main causes of this disruption are blockchain’s ability to enable disintermediation, and how it provides an immutable historical record of data. Blockchain technology itself solves many of the problems that data governance professionals, and data management technology vendors have been trying to solve for years: group consensus on the most recent version of the truth for a given entity, and full instance lineage (provenance) of the data.

While blockchain has been able to transform these solutions, forward-thinkers are asking: will blockchain have the same disruptive effect on data management? There are two main factors to consider when assessing blockchain’s potential to disrupt data integration, storage, and data integrity: