Those who have been involved with rolling out iOS devices in regulated industries have typically encountered massive problems with securing documents on devices.
Shoe-horning some third party editing software into a corporate mobile offering has been OK until now, allowing users to quickly reference content instead to creating it; but with the introduction on the iPad Pro and accessories that have been purposely created to encourage users to perform actual day to day work on their devices, we see that users would still rather send documents to their personal email accounts and use the tools they know and love to get work done.
For information security departments in regulated companies this scenario is a nightmare; If the regulator comes knocking for a full audit trail of a confidential document that has ended up for sale on the dark web, then only part of the story can be revealed.
I think that Blockchain technology could help users and Infosec departments have their cake and it when it comes to document data retention. Imagine being able to send documents using any method and being able to track every time the document had beeng sent and audit that information.
Microsoft are thinking about this problem already as evidenced by their ‘Azure RMS’ product *which must really piss of Richard Stallman*
The main problem that I can see with the Blockchain document auditing process is that if someone wanted to leak the document content, they could just copy/paste it into something that isn’t going to connect to the blockchain to register the transfer of content.
So why do it?
Lets say Microsoft set up a Blockchain network, open it up and encourage all legitimate software platform developers to implement the transaction protocol into their products, then it could allow people to simply email their work home, use their favourite operating systems, personal devices etc to get their work done in a productive way. There would be a ton of bugs to work out, specifically how we could stop the data leaking, but I would love to see how this technology can help corporate users be more productive, by using their personally owned software.