New government blockchain-as-a-service available on G-Cloud

Public sector bodies can try out blockchain for £99 a pop

The UK government has unveiled a blockchain-as-a-service offering that is now available to public sector organisations through the GDS Digital Marketplace on G-Cloud 8.

The Credits Blockchain as a Service platform is a collaboration between Credits, the Isle of Man start-up formed in 2014 by CEO Nick Williamson and COO Eric Benz, and Skyscape Cloud Services, the public-service-only cloud services provider that is currently undergoing a name change to UKCloud.

The service, which comes in at £99 per instance, is intended to offer secure transactional and audit capabilities to UK public sector bodies including health, local government and education.

A blockchain is a form of immutable decentralised ledger to which information may be written but not altered or deleted. It provides a permanent record that cannot be manipulated by a single entity and requires no central registry.

Blockchains are the basis of crypto-currencies such as bitcoin, and the technology has recently attracted a lot of interest from banks and insurance companies as a way of securing transactions, reducing fraud and money laundering and saving on the costs of audit and paperwork. Other possible uses for blockchains are holding metadata about health records, managing secure identities for online transactions and access to services, making supply chains more transparent, and enabling machine-to-machine 'smart contracts'.

Big technology vendors such as Microsoft and IBM have been rolling out blockchain-as-a-service offerings on their cloud platforms, too, but the technology is still very new and the public sector is bound by stringent regulations. The new service is hosted in UK data centres only.

The Credits platform has already been trialled by the government of the Isle of Man, which used it to launch a custom registry. It is designed to be interoperable with other blockchains running on different cloud platforms and supports multiple government networks including PSN, Janet, PNN and N3.

In January the government's chief scientist, Sir Mark Walport, urged the public sector to take a close look at blockchain technology. "It has the potential to redefine the relationship between government and the citizen in terms of data sharing, transparency and trust," he said.

But it was rejected as being immature and profligate by then-GDS CTO Tom Loosemore when looking at verification solutions: "The energy required to run it would send us back to the dark ages," he said in 2015.

Since then advances have been made, however, and blockchains are now available that do not require such vast amounts of processing to remain secure.