Author: Shamsh Hadi

A recent Crowdstrike blog argues how “like so many legacy technologies, legacy data loss prevention (DLP) tools fail to deliver the protection today’s organizations need.”

Crowdstrike notes that with rising attacks, new attack vectors, and higher cost data breaches, organizations are desperate for a modern alternative to traditional cybersecurity solutions, where (as the blog summarizes):

• Unstructured data on endpoints is at great risk of misuse or breach
• More than a third of data loss prevention deployments fail
• Your data is too complex for legacy data loss prevention tools
• Legacy data loss prevention tools lack visibility into real-world data flows, and so lack context to stop breaches

While I agree with all of Crowdstrike’s arguments, I believe blockchain technology improves cybersecurity and propose that storing your data on blockchain is a necessary leap forward in security versus legacy technologies.

Why is it vital that your organization moves to blockchain-based data storage? Four key reasons:

• Immutable Records
  One of the main benefits of blockchain technology is its ability to provide secure and tamper-proof record keeping, as the use of cryptography and peer-consensus mechanisms ensures that once data is recorded on the blockchain, it is extremely difficult to alter or delete. This immutability and transparency provide important chain-of-custody audit capabilities for courts and ensure peace of mind to users. Such security also makes blockchains ideal for use in financial transactions, real estate agreements and other high-value exchanges, where a record of every step is essential for ensuring the integrity of the process.
  

• Secure Authentication
  One of the main issues in cybersecurity is the vulnerability of traditional authentication methods such as passwords. Passwords can be easily hacked or stolen, leaving sensitive information vulnerable to attack. This can be a threat to businesses, especially those who store their users’ personal information. Blockchain technology can provide secure authentication through the use of public-private key cryptography, eliminating passwords from the process.
  

• Decentralization
  Unliked centralized databases which can be breached at unsecure endpoints (users and devices)—or even at MSPs hosting them—giving attackers complete control once they gain central access, blockchain technology distributes data across geographically separate nodes.
  
  The decentralized nature of blockchains ensures that there is no single point of failure, which also means that hackers cannot easily compromise the system. By decentralizing data storage, blockchain effectively prevents any one endpoint (even if compromised) from gaining control of the full data set.
  
  This distributed nature defeats those attacks seeking to breach a system and holistically encrypt the data files stored therein. For example, breaching a single endpoint node and attempting to hold data “for ransom” fails, as the larger data set cannot be controlled by any one endpoint (or central authority) and so attackers cannot capture the full data set for encryption, ransom, or shutting down the network.
  
  Further, with private, permissioned blockchains, each endpoint node (or user) has a unique encryption key to access and write to the distributed ledger. If any one of those endpoints is successfully attacked (presumedly compromising their access key), the private blockchain can simply remove distributed ledger access for that compromised key, issue the endpoint a new key, and allow that endpoint to quickly regain distributed ledger access (effectively as a new endpoint).
  
  This unique recovery process effectively maroons any ransomware on the endpoint it attacked—ending its access and threat—while allowing the endpoint to re-engage the larger data set: With a new key and without needing to pay any ransom to the attackers for restored access.
  

• Identity Verification
  Identity verification is another area where blockchain can be used to enhance cybersecurity.  It ensures that the individual claiming a particular identity is actually who they say they are. With blockchain, users can have greater control over their personal information, allowing them to manage their digital identities more securely. This makes it more difficult for hackers to steal personal information or create fake identities.

ZorroSign’s Data Security Platform Built on Blockchain

As the world becomes more digitized and interconnected, the importance of cybersecurity will only continue to grow, and blockchain storage will play a crucial role in ensuring that our digital world remains safe and secure.

ZorroSign was built from the ground up on Hyperledger Fabric to deliver digital signatures with the superior privacy and security of blockchain. We recently announced our advanced integration with Provence Blockchain, adding their DLT to our architecture as well.

Our Z-Vault® enables ZorroSign users to store, structure, organize and search documents in folders and subfolders natively with the peace of mind that comes from blockchain-based data privacy and security—leaving legacy technologies behind for good.

ZorroSign’s platform can be accessed via PCs and mobile devices, allowing your staff to efficiently generate, negotiate, communicate, and sign agreements. And with Z-Vault, contracts reside on an immutable document management system where they can be saved, searched for, and easily managed from a single, intuitive user interface.

Z-Vault Benefits for Your Organization

• Superior privacy and security to PKI-based solutions using a centralized database
• The latest privacy and security technologies, delivering powerful encryption safeguards
• Secure, yet intuitively navigable and easily accessible (for authorized users) platform
• Ability to share and review Z-Sign and architectural drawings, adding your own comments

Save time with access to specific folders and documents in seconds, no loss of records

I believe blockchain-based data storage is critical to improving cybersecurity, and I invite you to learn more about Z-Vault to securely store contracts, data, and documents on blockchain instead of legacy technologies.

Learn more about Z-Vault or connect with me on LinkedIn to start a conversation today!

I have spent much of 2023 talking about technology and the exciting progress we’ve seen in artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain this year. But at ZorroSign, we are committed to advancing technology while advancing sustainability—and I want to focus on those sustainability efforts today.

I have been fortunate to travel the world, attending educational institutions from Boston to New York, Toronto to Vancouver, Dubai, Hong Kong, and Singapore. This global education not only made me feel like a citizen of the world, but it also opened my eyes to both the beauty of our planet and the damage humans can do it. No matter your individual politics on climate change, we can all agree that conserving natural resources will benefit our children and the human generations to follow. As such, we have a role in sustaining natural resources as effectively as we can during our time as stewards of our home planet.

I founded ZorroSign not just to improve data democratization, privacy, and security as we move to 21^st century digital economies, but also to improve sustainability. 

Aspiring to a digital, paperless life allows all of us to potentially save trees, save water, and reduce our carbon footprints. Businesses, governments, educational institutions, organizations, and individuals who use ZorroSign go digital and so “go green”:  Creating, approving, sharing, executing, and storing digital agreements, documents, and transactions instead of printing, faxing, scanning, and shipping documents to collect signatures, then storing multiple hard copies forever in filing cabinets.

This environment savings is critically valuable—not only to the ZorroSign users who save costs and save resources, but to everyone else on Earth who benefit from those same savings!

To accelerate this value, I have committed ZorroSign to several international conservation efforts, hoping to additionally replenish those natural resources already consumed.  For example . . .

Save a Tree. Plant a Tree

Through our Save a Tree. Plant a Tree program, ZorroSign has pledged to plant a new tree on behalf of our customers every time they save 8,000 pages of copy paper.

One tree produces roughly 8,000 pages of copy paper. Studies show that by reducing the use of paper, we can realize significant environmental benefits such as conserving water, reducing carbon emissions, improving air quality, and reducing deforestation. So by using ZorroSign in human resources, financial, legal, sales, and other departments, you can not only save trees (and watch your cost of doing business go down), but you are also helping replant trees to reforest the planet.

One Tree Planted

Since 2014, the non-profit organization One Tree Planted has more than doubled the number of trees planted each year. The NPO works with partners across more than 80 countries in North America, Latin America, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Pacific to drive global reforestation. One Tree Planted makes it simple for anyone to help the environment by planting trees: Restoring forests, creating habitat for biodiversity, and making a positive social impact around the world.

ZorroSign has been an active partner since 2018, and we give to One Tree Planted in the hopes of inspiring other businesses to include such reforestation as part of their sustainability efforts. To learn more about this incredible program, visit OneTreePlanted.org

United Nations’ Plant for the Planet

In 2004, Wangari Maathai, a professor and member of Kenya’s Parliament, won the Nobel Peace Prize for her role as the founder of the Green Belt Movement. In 2006, Professor Maathai launched a billion-tree campaign, with the United Nations Environment Program called Plant for the Planet. That program achieved their goal and now runs the Trillion Tree Campaign!

Again, ZorroSign is a proud contributor to the Trillion Tree Campaign and invites you to learn more about this growing UN effort at Plant-for-the-Planet.org

Supply Chain Traceability and Transparency

Beyond these conservation programs, “blockchain has significant potential to support sustainability, and it may prove to be a valuable tool to help companies advance environmental goals,’ notes PwC. 

For example, blockchain technologies like ZorroSign help create more transparent and traceable supply chains. Such traceability can reduce waste and improve the sustainability of products and materials. A company might use blockchain to track the source and movement of raw materials, ensuring that they are being sourced sustainably and ethically. This enables consumers to make more informed choices about the products they buy, and encourages companies to adopt more sustainable practices.

“Blockchain will prove to be the ultimate answer to supply chain transparency,” explains Rhonda Dibachi for Forbes. “Requiring that suppliers accept APIs is one way of gaining visibility in a world where no digital architecture currently exists for it. To get beyond the self-contained bubble of the connected factory to the next step—a connected supply chain—you have to invite your suppliers in, and the blockchain offers a mechanism for the trust that will be required. That’s why blockchain will be the ultimate solution for all sorts of business that requires trust.”

“Blockchain’s role in helping the environment can go far beyond energy footprints and carbon credits as well,” adds CoinDesk in a recent article. “We expect to see an increasing number of sustainability-focused systems launching in 2023, where things like water usage or plastic creation could similarly be tracked and reported. Governments and regulators could create clear standards for what levels of environmental impact are acceptable across various industries and utilize these blockchain systems to monitor them. This would not only benefit the planet itself, but it would also streamline business processes via clear expectations for emissions. Even electrical grids can be managed via blockchains and smart contracts.”

COP28 in Dubai

Last but not least, I’d like to promote the 2023 Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) — COP28.  This global event will be hosted in Dubai, United Arab Emirates this November 30th through December 12th, and I am thrilled to attend! 

COP28 UAE promises to be a milestone moment when the world will take stock of progress on the Paris Agreement—a legally binding international treaty on climate change adopted at COP21 in Paris, France, December 2015 and entered into force November 2016.

To learn more about this year’s event, including opportunities to participate, visit COP28.com

Finally, I invite you to connect with me on LinkedIn to discuss how your technology leadership can support sustainability and environmental conservation as well.

I was recently honored to join the Women in Global Leadership event in Phoenix.  Hosted by Doug Bruhnke and Connie Kadansky for Global Chamber – Phoenix, the event featured a panel of speakers, fashion show, and tour of the amazing Bespoke Manufacturing Company with CEO Kirby Best.

Diana White facilitated the panel, where I was invited to join Alexandria Van Haren, Rangina Hamidi, Martha Medina, and Tracey Latham to speak on opportunities and obstacles women face in global leadership.  My part was to include a male perspective in the panel’s discussion.

Diana asked questions about mentorship and the panelists’ experiences with structured and unstructured mentorship in their careers.  Some of them admitted they struggled to find women mentors and were grateful to the men who had offered guidance and support early in their careers.  They often found they themselves had to become mentors to other women, as structured opportunities for mentorship in their industries simply wasn’t common.

Diana next asked about examples of global leadership for women, and how the panelists perceived current leadership around the world.  All of us agreed greater integrity was needed of leaders, as well the courage to stand up for truth and righteousness—even when such opinions might be unpopular. 

I was able to contribute some sobering statistics on women’s leadership in the technology industry,  including:

• Women make up just 27.6% of the tech industry workforce
• Over 50% of women in tech report harassment and sexism
• Only 11% of women in tech serve in management roles
• 50% of women in tech leave their job before the age of 35 due to lack of job advancement
• And 30% of women over age 35 are still in junior tech positions, compared to just 5% of men

Diana then asked the panelists how they had thrived in industries typically dominated by men:  Lexie in aviation, Rangina in Afghanistan government, Martha in biochemistry, and Tracey in electronics manufacturing.  All of the women found a strong belief in themselves, a resolve to overcome all obstacles, and to succeed in fields they loved despite the lack of women’s leadership in those fields. As such, they made themselves leaders and so hope their successes can inspire other women to believe in themselves as well.

Finally, Diana closed the panel asking how we might make progress faster in women’s leadership.  We readily shared the perspective that allies and mentors help speed progress, as well as continuing education and an ability to define leadership on your own terms—not necessarily the historical or patriarchal perspectives on what it means to lead.

I was thrilled to be included in this important discussion, and hope my contributions were encouraging to the women on the panel and the women in the audience, hearing these real-world stories of opportunities and obstacles, setbacks and success.  It was an uplifting event and I am so grateful to the Global Chamber—and my colleagues on the panel—for this chance to advance and support global leadership for women!

At ZorroSign we recently made a major change to our platform architecture!

We have always been built on blockchain—and have always delivered the most private, most secure digital signatures—but we wanted to scale our platform much more aggressively, and that vison required a big change in how we develop and deploy our technology. Specifically, we moved from a centralized, monolithic approach to using microservices and containers.

Let me explain why we choose this new engineering approach and how your company might benefit from a similar move.

What Are Microservices? What Are Containers?

“A microservices architecture splits your application into multiple services that perform fine-grained functions and are part of your application as a whole,” explains IBM. “Each of your microservices will have a different logical function for your application.”

Explained another way, “a microservices framework creates a massively scalable and distributed system, which avoids the bottlenecks of a central database,” says Avi Networks (now part of VMware). “Microservices break an application into independent, loosely-coupled, individually deployable services… allowing for each service to scale or update using the deployment of service proxies without disrupting other services in the application and enabling the rapid, frequent and reliable delivery of large, complex applications.”

There are two types of microservices:  Stateless (which do not save data, so any data is lost when the microservice’s container restarts), and Stateful (which do save data and so write to a database).

And where do you put those microservices? In containers.

“Containers are packages of your software that include everything that it needs to run, including code, dependencies, libraries, binaries, and more,” continues IBM. “Docker and Kubernetes are the most popular frameworks to orchestrate multiple containers in enterprise environments”

“Containers are a lightweight alternative to VMs for providing isolated operating environments for your workloads,” says Edward Kisller for JFrog. “Containers avoid the infrastructure overhead of a full-blown OS and provide only those resources (i.e., installations, dependencies, and code) that your applications actually need.” In other words, containers do not use all the CPU or RAM but instead share the operating system kernel for faster boots and less memory consumption.

“A container is a useful resource allocation and sharing technology. It’s something dev-ops people get excited about,” writes Ev Kontsevoy for Teleport. “A microservice is a software design pattern. It’s something developers get excited about.”

Why Develop with Microservices? What Are the Benefits?

“Microservices architectures make applications easier to scale and faster to develop,” notes Amazon Web Services. “Enabling innovation and accelerating time-to-market for new features.”

Such were ZorroSign’s high-level goals:  To improve scalability, resilience, and productivity.

“Moving to microservices enabled a polyglot tech stack,” said Priyal Walpita, chief technology officer at ZorroSign. “Which means our engineers could contribute to our development efforts using the technology stacks that they know best, plus we boosted performance and facilitated a continuous delivery pipeline for easier and faster deployments.”

“Applications were traditionally built as monolithic pieces of software,” continues Avi Networks. “Monolithic applications have long life cycles, are updated infrequently and changes usually affect the entire application. Adding new features requires reconfiguring and updating the entire stack — from communications to security. This costly and cumbersome process delays time-to-market and updates in application development.”

In contrast to monolithic apps, microservices/container architectures bring benefits such as greater:

• Agility — Microservices foster the organization of small, independent teams that take ownership of their services. “Best examples of microservices agility are sites like Amazon, eBay, Uber and Netflix, which are active 24×7,” notes AnAr Solutions. “The performance of these sites is a benchmark for other sites and applications. The response time, ability to handle multiple requests and process in minimum time is commendable.”

• Productivity — “The microservice architecture tackles the speed issue of applications and its productivity by dividing it into small parts. In this way, these applications are developed and maintained at a very fast speed,” writes Terralogic. “Different teams work independently without waiting for the other team to finish their chunks of work. In this way, separate microservices are easier to locate and modify. Quality assurance of this microservice architecture is very fast as the programs which are developed early are tested instead of waiting for all the programs to be completed.”

• Resilience — With microservices, an application will still function if part of it goes down because microservices allow for spinning up a replacement, granting the entire system higher resilience. “Three well-known microservices resiliency techniques improve fault tolerance and allow applications to smoothly handle failures,” explains Dr. Alan F. Castillo for Cloud Computing Technologies: Retry patterns, circuit breaker patterns, and timeout design patterns. “Employing these patterns is a very effective resiliency strategy for microservices applications. It doesn’t matter how you apply these patterns; what matters is that you have systems that can properly deal with failures.”

• Continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) — Microservice facilitate CI/CD for applications and modernize the technology stack. “There are some goals of a strong CI/CD progression to serve in the microservices design, for example, every team of coders independently develop and install their changes or edits owned by them individualistically so that it did not affect or disrupt the work of other teams,” reports DevOps Enabler. “CI/CD best practices include the goal of automating the building process, testing the products, and then releasing the software. Developers must be able to track the performance metrics of DevOps throughout the software delivery lifecycle and warn people so that they can quickly recover if something goes wrong during deployment or release cycle.”

• Scalability — Meeting demand is easier when microservices only have to scale the necessary components, which requires fewer resources. “Since an application is composed of multiple micro services which share no external dependencies, scaling a particular micro service instance in the flow is greatly simplified,” writes Atul Saini for Fiorano Software. “If a particular microservice in a flow becomes a bottleneck due to slow execution, that microservice can be run on more powerful hardware for increased performance if required, or one can run multiple instances of the microservice on different machines to process data elements in parallel.”

• Security — “Migrating to microservices creates an opportunity for a much better security model,” explains Kontsevo. “As every microservice is a specialized process, it is a good idea to only allow it to access resources it needs. This way a vulnerability in just one microservice will not expose the rest of your system to an attacker.”

Not everything is easier with microservices, of course. Three commonly acknowledged challenges of deploying microservices typically include: First, the “complexity from managing microservices written in different languages,” as we’ve done at ZorroSign. Second, the “cost implications of network resource usage from remote calls across multiple services” and third, “investigating root causes or auditing systems becomes challenging when dealing with log management across distributed services, as log aggregators would be required,” suggests BMC.

But complexity, costs, and support all increase when any application grows, so facing those challenges with a microservices architecture is little different than facing the complexity, costs, and support challenges of a larger monolithic app.

Why ZorroSign Choose Microservices—and Why You Should, Too

Our CTO and I have been assessing microservices for several years, and committed to an overhaul of our DevOps a year ago. We spent the first half of 2022 building the next iteration of ZorroSign’s blockchain platform with microservices and containers.

“Beyond the development advantages, microservices allow us to more easily manage complex ZorroSign back-end services and improve our entire system’s resiliency,” said Walpita. “It’s far easier finding and fixing bugs, allowing our development team to focus on single, isolated functionality, and then deploying asynchronously to other development efforts, whenever new functionality is tested and ready.”

From my perspective, I was intrigued to learn how microservices improved our defense-in-depth capabilities, as security can be configured much more granularly and configured at each microservice level. With ZorroSign’s commitment to privacy and security, microservices were another important upgrade to keep our platform ahead of the competition.

“Our team develops in C#, Go, Java, and Python,” adds Walpita. “Being able to deploy all those program languages in a single application, united across AWS cloud tools, Docker, and Kubernetes, gives ZorroSign the flexibility our engineers desire and the scalability our customers demand.”

Finally, I asked Priyal what advice he might give other organizations thinking of deploying microservices. He said: “Make sure your product and development team are mature enough to adopt the complexity of a microservice architecture. At some point, a growing app’s need for scalability, higher resilience, and improved performance may make microservices the best path forward. But ensuring your DevOps are ready to integrate and manage all the pieces of a polyglot tech stack is the key to success.”

I encourage you to consider microservices for your apps, and welcome the chance to talk more about this exciting architecture for new technologies!

Blockchain advocates have long been excited about distributed ledger technology’s potential for cybersecurity, financial services (especially cross-border payments), the Internet of Things (IoT), real estate, and supply chain management. But as we look ahead to 2023, some other interesting markets are worth watching for the latest trends in blockchain use. Here are four industries I believe will accelerate blockchain adoption to their great advantage . . .

Cloud Services

The worldwide public cloud services market, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) generated $408.6 billion in 2021 revenues, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC). Big Tech players “Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft have together invested almost $120 billion in the past 12 months,” calculates as recent article in The Economist. “Most of it in data centres and the servers that power them.”

While the cloud services industry is still young, this tremendous growth (and high profit margins) drive innovation. Such innovation will include more blockchain technology in 2023.

For example, “cloud storage is another sector that blockchain can electrify and change. Traditionally, cloud storage companies allow users to purchase a certain amount of storage that is generally sold by the terabyte,” explains a recent Investment Bank article. “Blockchain technology provides users a means to store information on a peer-to-peer network. A cloud storage platform could be run by the nodes that help facilitate transactions. The nodes would be giving up storage on their computers to the consumer, but the node owners would be compensated by the consumers for storing their data.”

More broadly for cloud services, blockchain brings greater privacy and security capabilities. “When cloud computing is integrated with blockchain technology, the main problem, security and privacy, gets addressed,” writes Tanvir Zafar for Yahoo! Finance. “Data deletion from one computer does not erase data stored on other devices on a blockchain network. As a result, there is no danger of data loss or alteration. Data on a blockchain is irremovable. It allows for clear documentation of data usage, including where, when, and how it is being used and by whom. Blockchains are governed by codes, eliminating the need for third-party rules, making them a more secure alternative.”

Such elevated privacy, security, and automation can quickly advance cloud computing—not only delivering greater benefits to consumers, but potentially lowering costs and overhead for providers.

Beyond these improvements to today’s cloud services, blockchain can be added as a service offering itself. “In blockchain-based cloud computing, blockchain can be used for secure network management by hosting the blockchain network as Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) in a cloud environment,” suggests Kenny Kleinerman for Ridge. “BaaS supports IoT applications by offering different blockchain-enabled services, such as smart contract services, verification services on user transactions, and cloud blockchain storage.”

I foresee blockchain as a huge piece of cloud services—both infrastructure and offering—in the years ahead!

Government

At ZorroSign, we have already seen many government agencies, departments, and ministries adopting blockchain for operations. “Governments are likely to begin implementing distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems that will replace traditional paper-based systems,” writes Finnegan Pierson for Chetu. “The migration to digital data systems has been going on for quite some time, but DLT has greater advantages that provide greater trust, transparency and security via encryption and validation features.”

Government organizations can readily improve constituent communications and administration with the innovative adoption of blockchains.  For example, blockchain can improve:

• Form processing and chain-of-custody tracking of government documents
• Identification and elimination of errors in government documents, plus reduce tampering and detect forgery
• Operational efficiency by eliminating paper-based records (and related equipment and supplies to print, copy, distribute, and store paper documents)
• Cost controls by reducing the expense of manually processing applications, forms, and documentation of all kinds and instead implementing digital records stored on blockchain

In the UAE, for example, H.H. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s Digital City Vision for Smart Dubai has been a guiding principle for ZorroSign and other blockchain innovators. For ZorroSign, we share his goal of a paperless life in the UAE by 2030, but Digital Dubai pursues many technologies, as the leaders have found “government effectiveness became increasingly imperative especially in Government to Consumer (G2C) and Government to Government (G2G) services.”

Specific to blockchain, “The Dubai Blockchain strategy will usher in economic opportunity for all sectors in the city, and cement Dubai’s reputation as a global technology leader,” notes the Digital Dubai initiative. “In line with Digital Dubai’s mandate to become a global leader in the smart economy, fueling entrepreneurship and global competitiveness.” Such vision for government is starting in Dubai, but readily seen as critical to future governance in other countries.

Perhaps most exciting, “blockchain technology can end voter fraud,” claims Shivam Arora in an article for Simplilearn. How? With blockchain “people can vote online easily without revealing their identities. Using blockchain, officials can count votes with absolute accuracy, knowing that each ID can be attributed to only one vote. Fraud cannot occur because it is next to impossible with blockchain technology. And, once a vote is added to a ledger, it cannot be changed or erased.” The opportunity to improve voting processes and ensure democratic results will surely keep blockchain in the government focus for years to come.

Law

As blockchain transforms government, so it will transform the law and legal services.

There are many ways blockchain technology is already transforming legal services, writes Steve Glaveski for the NewLaw Academy: “Smart contracts, dispute resolution, IP rights… where The blockchain can support evidence of creation, first use, and rights management, and can track distribution. This ultimately prevents copyright infringement and enforces mitigation via time-stamped copies of work, aiding plaintiffs if appearing before a court. Land and property registries (that today) are notorious for being out of date, decentralized, and restricted. And public service records.”

Again, at ZorroSign we have seen law firms and legal departments start with digital signatures for digital transactions, then quickly expand their use of blockchain to store, track, and manage their contracts and agreements. Contract lifecycle management (or CLM) solutions help attorneys to manage the complex and evolving nature of contracts—making them more efficient at producing, executing, and upholding contractual agreements. Leveraging blockchain, ZorroSign manages contracts as we manage all digital documents, providing digital signatures to quickly execute legally binding contracts, a patented Z-Forensics token to ensure contract immutability, and a document management system built on blockchain for immutable storage.

Consensys, a software foundry providing decentralized software services and apps on Ethereum, believes blockchain can make the legal industry more accessible and more transparent. “Lawyers can leverage blockchain technology to streamline and simplify their transactional work, digitally sign and immutably store legal agreements,” claims a Consensys article. And “blockchain-based contracts have baked-in compliance, no surprises, and no room for misinterpretation.”

As transactions and records move to digital workflows, digital signing ceremonies, and digital storage, blockchain will be a boon to law firms and legal department in 2023 and beyond.

Identity

Finally, with the move to digital commerce and communications, our individual identity—as mapped to digital worlds—becomes increasingly important to control and authenticate.

“Identity systems are currently flawed in a number of ways. They are porous, operate in isolation and prone to error,” adds Finnegan Pierson again in Chetu. “Blockchain systems can solve these problems and provide a single source to verify identity and assets. Blockchain identity can also offer a type of ‘self-sovereignty’ that hasn’t existed before.”

This desire for control over one’s personal information—and digital data across platforms—lies at the heart of web3. While web3 starts with blockchain, its ambition and scope will spread far across the Internet, metaverses, and shared networks.

“Identification and credentials are easier for everyone to work with when they’re digital: vaccination cards, academic qualifications, occupational licenses, employee ID and more. But this highly personal information must remain private and secure,” says IBM. “Governments, businesses and educational institutions are turning to blockchain as a proven way to enable a secure and trusted infrastructure and improve services.”

“One of the most problematic results of the internet age has been identity security,” notes Nathan Reiff for Investopedia. “Blockchain technology has already demonstrated the potential for transforming the way that online identity management takes place. The applications for blockchain and identity management are wide-ranging.”

From cloud services, cybersecurity, and IT to financial services, government, healthcare, legal services, real estate, supply chains, and other industries, blockchain is changing how we do business, share information, and identify ourselves.

These trends are just the start, however, and the opportunities for blockchain to improve the privacy and security of our digital data will flourish in the years ahead.

Contact us to learn more . . . or start a free trial to put our blockchain software for digital signatures to the test!

Last year, I shared how ZorroSign’s early roots in Dubai, UAE, helped us grow into an international company. I want to update that theme today and talk about ZorroSign’s role as a global company providing global solutions that improve data democratization, privacy, and security.

As CEO and co-founder of ZorroSign, I have dedicated my career to advancing technology while simultaneously advancing sustainability:  Ensuring the new technologies we bring to market elevate information privacy, data security, and data democratization while not coming at the expense of future generations.

At ZorroSign, we saw very early a market need to push past web2 solutions for digital signatures and digital transactions—escaping centralized information architectures that consolidate data with a provider (and expose that data to the risks of single-point-of-failure cyber-attacks) while simultaneously pulling data ownership away from users (to be housed and monetized by the web2 provider). Alternatively, ZorroSign empowers our users by deploying web3 solutions that decentralize data and ensure users will always own their documents and transaction metadata—even after their subscriptions with us end.

Dubai Start, Dubai Strong

As a long-time resident of Dubai, I was greatly inspired by the Digital City Vision—Smart Dubai of H.H. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. ZorroSign’s technology very purposefully supports Dubai’s paperless initiatives for Digital Dubai and helps to advance Dubai’s leadership in digital operations, specifically focused on:

• Security—providing superior digital privacy and security by leveraging a private, permissioned blockchain technology
• Digital Signatures—a platform that is easy-to-use and legally compliant to global standards
• Chain of Custody—delivering immutable records of every step of every digital transaction: Authenticating users, securing data, and verifying documents for legal enforceability
• Advancing UAE’s 10 Principles for the Next 50 Years—specifically helping Dubai to build the best and most dynamic economy in the world; defining new UAE development with digital, technical, and scientific excellence; and promoting a value system based on openness and tolerance

Initially, our company served government departments in UAE but soon grew into an international business—helping people to build, sign, store, and track mission-critical documents on the blockchain in Sri Lanka, India, and the United States.

Last year, ZorroSign was named Blockchain SaaS Innovator of the Year at the UAE Business Awards 2021, then at the turn of the year, Unlock News Desk showcased a story on UAE Based ZorroSign introducing six new features to our blockchain platform.

This spring, Tech Channel wrote a great article on ZorroSign making waves in digital signature space using blockchain technology, and TahawulTech.com interviewed me on how ZorroSign helps tackle identity theft on our now multi-chain blockchain platform.

And most recently, ZorroSign was highlighted in a Zawya article for UAE businesses and a TECHx article on ZorroSign’s mission to provide businesses across the Middle East with seamless integration of document management and secure digital signature solutions.

I am incredibly proud of our continued success in my home town, and while ZorroSign expands our global presence, the UAE and other Gulf Cooperation Council countries will be a strategic market for us.

Success in South Asia

From the start, ZorroSign has had close ties with the south Asia countries of India and Sri Lanka. While operations started in Dubai, our development center of excellence has always been in Colombo!

Our blockchain architecture was conceived, coded, and cultivated entirely in Sri Lanka with a vision to provide global customers with the ability to securely transform paper-based workflows to digital operations. I could not be prouder of our Sri Lanka team, and though they are struggling through that beautiful country’s difficult political and economic crisis, they have proven again and again the resilience and tenacity of their engineering genius.

Recently, APAC Business Headlines recognized the ZorroSign team as the “Most Innovative Blockchain Company from Sri Lanka” for 2022! The award validates the hard work of our center of excellence team, and further proves blockchain’s prominence on the global stage.

This recognition followed our 2021 success where the International Business Awards® named ZorroSign a Gold Stevie® Award Winner for Blockchain Solutions. The Stevie’s are the world’s premier business awards program, where in 2021 more than 3,700 nominations from organizations across 63 nations and territories—of all sizes and in virtually every industry—were submitted for recognition. We were delighted to be awarded a gold Stevie for our blockchain solution and to be recognized as a Company of the Year, and Most Innovative Tech Company of the Year. Most flattering, the judges were quick to note that ZorroSign is “one of the few companies that are able to use blockchain technology to solve a real business problem” . . . a strong endorsement of our digital signature technology, built on blockchain, and paired with identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) and patented fraud detection, to authenticate users and verify documents across digital transactions.

Tackling North American Markets

As a U.S. citizen who has lived in Canada, China, and the UAE at various times over the past forty years, my goal was always to return home and bring ZorroSign’s blockchain solutions to North American users.

In August 2020, we opened our global operations hub in Phoenix, Arizona—ushering in a new phase of business growth. We quickly established local partnerships with Arizona State University, Grand Canyon State University, the Arizona Commerce Authority, Arizona Technology Council, City of Phoenix, Global Chamber®, the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, and many other incredible organizations!

And we’ve engaged government agencies, financial services providers, IT businesses (and departments), legal services firms, real estate companies, and several other verticals to prove the value of a paperless life and the most private, secure, compliant digital transactions hosted on blockchain. Early adopters of our web3 solutions are excited to embrace ZorroSign’s robust platform to advance their digital operations and gain a competitive advantage in a market place still dominated by legacy, web2 technologies.

Global Privacy and Security Compliance

Our unique combination of blockchain architecture, web3 technologies, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and patented fraud prevention grants ZorroSign compliance across many international standards for privacy and security.

The list continues to grow as we expand our markets, but already includes:

• Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA)
• Canada’s Uniform Electronic Commerce Act (UECA)
• The European Union’s Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for data privacy and security
• EU’s electronic IDentification, Authentication and trust Services (eIDAS) regulation
• India’s Information Technology Act 2000 (IT Act of India)
• International Standard on Assurance Engagements (ISAE) No. 3402, Type II audited
• International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001 certified
• PDF Advanced Electronic Signatures (PAdES) is a set of restrictions and extensions to PDF and ISO 32000-1
• The UAE’s Federal Law No. 1 of 2006 regarding Electronic Transactions and E-Commerce granting electronic signatures legal force and effect
• The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) SOC 2 Type I audit
• USA’s California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)
• USA’s Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) encryption standards
• USA’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
• USA’s Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (E-Sign Act)
• USA’s FDA Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulations; Electronic Records; Electronic Signatures
• USA’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
• USA’s Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA)

I am proud of all ZorroSign has achieved for our international customers and incredibly excited about some big announcements later this summer! ZorroSign is truly a global company delivering global solutions, and we are not resting on our laurels—the best is yet to come.

Contact us to learn more . . . or start your free trial to put our digital signature software to the test!

In an earlier article, I briefly introduced sustainability in advancing technology—specifically urging innovators to be aware of the impact of their new technologies on the environment and human sustainability.

In advance of Earth Day 2022, I reiterate that while it is easy to laud the potential of new technologies, we must also be wary of their effects on the environment . . . specifically the depletion of natural resources which may disrupt ecological balance. This is not to say innovation must be stymied, but that the true price of innovation must be measured in more than purely economic terms.

Defining Sustainability for Business

My quick definition of sustainability—from the Brundtland Report, drafted by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) in 1987—is simply “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”

Bigger picture, the idea of sustainability is “often broken down into three pillars: economic, environmental, and social—also known informally as profits, planet, and people.” For me, new technologies tend to span all three: Driven by economic goals, but often extracting environmental and social costs.

For example, it has been a long-running criticism of bitcoin that the proof-of-work data mining required to produce coins consumes an astonishing amount of electricity. With many public blockchains used for cryptocurrencies, mining coins requires complicated mathematical processing on high-end graphic processing units (GPUs), consuming energy both for calculation processing and cooling those GPUs down under heavy load.

“Scientists from the University of Cambridge Judge Business School recently built an interactive analysis tool to calculate the real energy cost of bitcoin cryptocurrency,” explains Caroline Delbert in Popular Mechanics. “Using their energy use model, the researchers found that bitcoin mining uses more energy each year (130.00 terawatt-hours [TWh]) than the entire country of Argentina (125.03 TWh).”

Another example might emphasize social sustainability. “Social sustainability is about identifying and managing business impacts, both positive and negative, on people,” notes UN Global Compact.

Recall how Facebook’s social network technologies were taken to task by The Social Dilemma—a documentary highlighting the dangerous impact of social networking, which represents a sustainability challenge to human societies.

The film shows that while social networks’ cost is not environmental per se, social media’s “design nurtures an addiction, manipulates people’s views, emotions, and behavior, and spreads conspiracy theories and disinformation . . . [plus an] effect on mental health (including the mental health of adolescents and rising teen suicide rates).” Such social costs put existing social media in direct conflict with sustainable practices.

Balancing Innovation and Sustainability

So how can innovators build and create without jeopardizing the “ability of future generations to meet their needs”?

Such effort requires vision beyond immediate solutions and an eye for real-world consequences . . . even those completely unintended or unexpected in the deployment and adoption of new technology.

“The Industrial Revolution brought forth extraordinary gains in financial prosperity. Between 1870 and 1910, per capita income in the United States rose almost 40 percent, and the value of manufacturing output increased sevenfold. Yet rapid industrialization left in its wake darkened noontime skies, noisy and unsafe machinery, and severely compromised living conditions,” write David Austin and Molly K. Macauley in a classic article from Brookings. “Technology is a double-edged sword—one capable both of doing and undoing damage to environmental quality.”

“Technology has the ability to significantly impact the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals,” says Jeff Fromm in a Forbes article on sustainability and innovation. “As well as improve work/life balance, enable commerce and so much more.”

Here, environmental technologies have a chance to remedy the historical efforts of Industrial Revolution technologies that brought pollution and ecological disruption, as well as massively depleting natural resources.

“We are currently living in a period of rapid change, where technological developments are revolutionizing the way we live, at the same time as leading us further into the depths of catastrophe in the form of climate change and resource scarcity,” adds a great piece by Edinburgh Sensors. “While the impact of technology on the environment has been highly negative, the concept of environmental technology could save our planet from the harm that has been done.”

Even those technologies that simply avert environmental damage, without perhaps directly rebuilding or restoring natural resources, can have a tremendously positive effect on sustainability.

ZorroSign’s Example

Circling back to my company, ZorroSign’s platform was originally built on private, permissioned Hyperledger Fabric.

Starting with this economic pillar, we constructed a blockchain platform unlike bitcoin and the proof-of-work cryptocurrency models, instead leveraging Hyperledger Fabric as a next-generation enterprise blockchain architecture with lower electricity costs and a smaller carbon footprint. Hyperledger Fabric is a next-generation enterprise blockchain architecture “with even lower electricity costs and attendant carbon footprints,” writes Michael Barnard in a CleanTechnica report.

Hyperledger Fabric’s architecture is so completely different from the mining and broadly distributed model of bitcoin, that the enterprise blockchain can operate faster with far, far lower energy consumption rates. This combination of speed and energy-efficiency made Hyperledger Fabric the sustainable choice to launch ZorroSign’s digital platform.

For the environmental pillar, ZorroSign’s vision includes a commitment to saving trees and having a positive impact on the environment through sustainable practices. With our Save-a-Tree, Plant-a-Tree program, ZorroSign plants a tree on behalf of our customers every time they save 8,000 pages of copy paper! As one tree produces roughly 8,000 pages of copy paper, this amounts to a double incentive:  Reducing the destruction of trees via reduced paper use and increasing the number of trees as reward for reducing paper use. Again, our efforts aspire to realize significant environmental benefits such as conserving water, reducing carbon emissions, improving air quality, and reducing deforestation.

At ZorroSign, we use blockchain to help individuals, businesses, and governments to achieve a paperless life. Here we embrace the social pillar: Understanding that switching to digital records is not only a smart business decision, but it is also good for the environment and society.

Every time someone uses ZorroSign to digitally sign agreements, contracts, and other documents—instead of printing, faxing, scanning, and couriering documents to collect signatures—we all save trees, save water, and reduce carbon emissions. By moving social costs from paper consumption, logistics, and storage to digital signatures, digital archiving, and digital chains-of-custody, we advance a technology that similarly advances sustainability.

I am eager to engage technology innovators in advancing their solutions while also advancing sustainability goals!  Connect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/shamsh-hadi/