This blog is the seventh in the series and discusses what AI and and SAP and Enterprise Blockchain are, why they are so important for each other, and then takes a deep dive in to the SAP product oriented reference architecture of how to implement SAP AI Core and S/4HANA and Enterprise Blochchain.
What will it take to make AI trustable ?
tl:dr
Enterprise Blockchain is the Cyber Security for Enterprise AI. π
This blog introduces the Enterprise Blockchain Wallet and Off-Chain data storage and demonstrates why it is so special and important for protecting the trustworthiness and reliability and integrity and originality of information and data, be patient and read on because the Enterprise Blockchain Wallet is something very special and enables us to protect large and unstructured data very simply and effectively and is one of the biggest reasons why an Enterprise Blockchain Database is so suited to protecting data for AI operations
The blog is going to break the subject down in to three sections:
Section 1.0: The What is it of SAP AI, and Enterprise Blockchain
Section 2.0: The Why is it, of SAP AI, and Enterprise Blockchain
Section 3.0: The How is it, of SAP AI, and Enterprise Blockchain
A huge amount has been written about both Artificial Intelligence and Enterprise Blockchain and there is no point to repeat everything here, so we will talk briefly about the subjects and then point to very useful resources for further reading, and focus our attention on why Enterprise Blockchain makes Artificial Intelligence trustable, and how to do it.
Section 1.0: The What is of SAP AI, and Enterprise Blockchain
What is Artificial Intelligence ?
and SAP has an amazing AI powered product roadmap, taking the product portfolio...
. from a System of Record
. through being a System of Engagement
. to being a System of Intelligence
What AI can do for the Enterprise, and where AI is going, massive opportunities are coming along, and it is happening all around us as we speak, this technology revolution is not on presentations, it is real and we can implement it and benefit from it right now, today. SAP's AI capabilities are growing by the day:
Like everything else we do in Enterprise IT,
AI is about Data
What is Enterprise Blockchain ?
Enterprise Blockchain is both:
. a Secure Store
. a Secure Communication Channel
McKinsey & Company, in their December 2023 Featured Insights Publication, gave a beautiful description of what is unique and special about Blockchain, "Blockchain is a secure database shared across a network of participants, where up-to-date information is available to all participants at the same time". If we just pause for a moment and let that sink in, and think about what that means, to Business Processes, to Collaboration, to System Resilience, we start to see what is so special about Blockchain Databases and Distributed Ledger Technology.
In these previous blogs, I made a deep dive in to what Enterprise Blockchain is and why we should be positioning it in our Enterprise Architecture:
Why I love SAP and Blockchain Databases and why you should too π
SAP Enterprise Architecture: Let the Use Case find the Blockchainπ
and in a nutshell, Enterprise Blockchain is:
. The Digital Transformation of Information Security
. The Next Generation Data Integrity, Originality, Confidentiality Protection
. Re-imagining Information Security
. Natively, out of the box, due to its special characteristics the strongest, hardest, most resilient Enterprise Database product
To wrap up this section:
. AI is about Data
. Enterprise Blockchain is about Security of Data
Section 2.0: The Why is it, of SAP AI, and Enterprise Blockchain
SAP say it themselves, building trust in AI, means the AI has to be:
. Relevant
. Reliable
. Responsible
What is AI's biggest risk ?
AI's biggest risk is that the Data behind the AI is not trustworthy. In the same way as asking the wrong person for directions can leave you going all around the houses, if the Data behind the AI, and this means the Models as well, has been changed/contaminated/modified/poluted/made unreliable, whether purposefully through malicious acts or cyber attack, or accidentally, the result will be AI insights which cannot be trusted, and the result of that could be catastrophic.
Gartner remind us of this, when they describe the 4 key initiatives to get your Enterprise AI ready, and number 2 is AI Cyber Security:
AI is about the Data
So, if we are going to do AI, then we need to care for and protect the Data that the AI is using.
Imagine, as described in the previous blog, when we let the Use Case find the Enterprise Blockchain, we have a Business Requirement, a Business Demand, to make AI trustable to make AI achieve as SAP put it, the three R's, Relevant, Reliable, Responsible:
In the US, NIST, the National Institute of Standards & Technology have a whole section dedicated to AI and risk.... The biggest risk to AI is the trustworthiness of the data:
When we look in our Enterprise Technology Standards, and we look for the Technology Standard in our Enterprise Portfolio which is positioned to bring the strongest protection to Data, we find the Enterprise Blockchain.
In the previous blogs, we have discussed in detail about the special characteristics of Enterprise Blockchain and just why it natively out of the box protects the integrity of data to a level that legacy database products cannot do, in a nutshell....
AI is about Data
AI is about the Data that goes in to the AI engine
This means AI depends on a Database or a Datastore
What kind of Database does AI need ? What capabilities does the Database for the AI Data need to have ?
1. It must not be possible to modify the Data in the Database which feeds the AI - the Database needs to be immutable
2. The Data in the Database, the integrity and originality of that Data must be protected to the highest level that is technically possible
3. The Data must be available with the highest availability, the Database must be resilient to attack
When we look in our Enterprise Technology Standards we find 1 Technology Standard in the Enterprise which has those capabilities, and that is..... Enterprise Blockchain
Enterprise Blockchain ticks those three boxes...
β Immutable - tick that box
β Integrity must be protected to the highest level - tick that box, thanks to the Enterprise Blockchain Hash Mechanism and the Enterprise Blockchain Consensus Mechanism
β Highest level of resilience and availability - tick that box thanks to the Distributed and Decentralised nature of the Enterprise Blockchain
This is why, Enterprise Blockchain is the enabler of trustable outcomes from Enterprise AI.
But there's more than that, AI, and especially during the AI Training, AI needs a lot of data, and that's why SAP AI Core uses SAP HANA Cloud (Data Lake) as the Data Source, because the volumes of data for training are big.
And this is why, in this blog we take the Enterprise Blockchain Technology story one level further and we introduce the:
Enterprise Blockchain Wallet
Off-Chain Data Storage
In the Enterprise Blockchain Platforms, the Enterprise Blockchain Wallet is used for Off-Chain storage of big data and in the following paragraphs we will explain why.
What is the Enterprise Blockchain Wallet, and what is Off-Chain Data Storage and why would we use them and why do we need them ?
As we have explained in a previous blog, the Enterprise Blockchain Database, the Distributed Ledger, can be looked at simply as a Database Table (which is replicated and synchronised across multiple Servers) and in principle it stores the Data like this:
This is fine, and suited to what we call Structured Data, and as AWS nicely describe, Structured Data is information like words and numbers. This kind of data is perfectly suited to being stored in an Enterprise Blockchain Database and also a legacy Database. Examples of the data would Names, Addresses, Phone Numbers, Product Information etc.
But, AI Artificial Intelligence software, especially during the Learning requires large quantities of this information, this data, and in SAP AI Core the volumes, the amounts of data which are required for AI Learning are so big, and are often stored in what's called CSV, Comma Separated Values files, and these CSV files will are too big to be stored on the Enterprise Blockchain Database itself, and they are too big to be stored in a Legacy Database.
And that's ok, Enterprise Blockchain Platforms are ready for that, and have been designed to store both Structured Data and Data which is in files which are so big that they cannot be stored in the Enterprise Blockchain Database itself.
So, if we can't store the large CSV file in Enterprise Blockchain Database, then how, in an Enterprise Blockchain Platform do we store large files of Data ?
Voila.... bring in the Enterprise Blockchain Platform Wallet. The best Enterprise Blockchain Platform products include what is called the Enterprise Blockchain Platform Wallet, or to make it shorter, the Enterprise Blockchain Wallet.
The Enterprise Blockchain Wallet enables us to store large Data, like large Files safely and securely off the chain, or 'Off-Chain'.
But if we store the large Data files Off-Chain in the Enterprise Blockchain Wallet, then how do we also have them some how on the Enterprise Blockchain Database ?
The way this works is elegant, in any decent Enterprise Blockchain Platform, the Enterprise Blockchain Wallet location is completely configurable, and could be anywhere from SAP HANA Cloud (Data Lake), or for example multiple hyperscaler object stores, such as Amazon S3, OSS (Alicloud Object Storage
Service), SAP HANA Cloud, Data Lake, and Azure Blob Storage.
The configurable Enterprise Blockchain Wallet of the Enterprise Blockchain Platform looks like this:
Ok, so we've got the AI Data stored in the (configurable) Enterprise Blockchain Wallet, but what about securing the AI Data ? Obviously the Enterprise Blockchain Wallet storage location has built in security, for example the SAP HANA Cloud, the AWS S3 Buckets, but we need more than the out of the box security of these products, the reason we are using the Enterprise Blockchain Database is because of the amazing security strengths that it natively out of the box has, and so, what about the Enterprise Blockchain Wallet, doesn't the Enterprise Blockchain Platform have some cool super hard way of protecting the data in the Enterprise Blockchain Wallet ?
Well yes it does, this is the magic of Enterprise Blockchain Database 'Off-Chain' storage in the Enterprise Blockchain Wallet. This is so unique to Blockchain Technologies.
What happens is this, when store data in the Enterprise Blockchain Wallet, the Enterprise Blockchain Platform software runs a hash algorithm over the data that we have stored and the data, and the large file gets hashed:
The data or the file in the Enterprise Blockchain Wallet gets hashed, and then, that hash is stored in the Enterprise Blockchain Database.
This means we now have a unique hash of that data or file, and if anybody or anything makes even the tiniest teeniest change to that data or file, next time we run a hash over that data or file the result will be different that the original hash which is safely stored in the Enterprise Blockchain Database and this is how we will know that the data has been changed and we cannot trust the Data and therefore we cannot use it for our Enterprise AI.
On the other hand, if just before we load the data in to the Enterprise AI from the Enterprise Blockchain Wallet, if we run a hash over the data and the hash result is the same as we have in the Enterprise Blockchain Database, then we will know we can trust the Data and we can use it in our AI and we will have trustable AI.
And this is why, for all of these reasons,
Trustable Enterprise AI depends on Data being stored in the Enterprise Blockchain
Outlier Ventures, in their AI Thesis, very nicely show how Enterprise Blockchain & Artificial Intelligence together solves the risks associated with AI alone:
To conclude this section, the Why to, of Artificial Intelligence and Enterprise Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence needs to be Reliable, Relevant, Responsible, for it to be Trustable.
Enterprise Blockchain, due to its native super strong security strength when used as a store of Data and Models for AI, enables AI to be Trustable.
Section 3.0: The How is it, of SAP AI, and Enterprise Blockchain
Now that we know why trustable Enterprise AI needs the Enterprise Blockchain Database to protect the integrity and originality of the Data and Models, how do we implement it today ?
Well that's easy, here are the ingredients and the recipe π
Ingredients, you're going to need:
Data Source(s) eg
S/4HANA and others
Enterprise AI Product
Large Storage for Large Data and the Enterprise Blockchain Wallet
Enterprise Blockchain Platform
These are the basic ingredients, the data from the S/4HANA will be stored in the SAP HANA Cloud (Data Lake) which will also be the Enterprise Blockchain Platform (configurable) Wallet, the Enterprise Blockchain Platform, and then SAP AI Core to read the Data from the (SAP HANA Cloud - Data Lake) Enterprise Blockchain Platform Wallet and process it through Enterprise AI and turn it in to insights through the SAP AI Launchpad.
And your Technical Reference Architecture will look something like this:
And that's how you do it.
Wrapping up, conclusions:
. Trustable Enterprise AI depends on Data being stored in the Enterprise Blockchain
Enterprise Blockchain is:
. The Digital Transformation of Information Security
. The Next Generation Data Integrity, Originality, Confidentiality Protection
. Re-imagining Information Security
. Natively, out of the box, due to its special characteristics the strongest, hardest, most resilient Enterprise Database product
Enterprise Blockchain is both:
. a Secure Store
. a Secure Communication Channel
The configurable Enterprise Blockchain Wallet enables you to store Big Data 'Off-Chain' and the hashes of the Big Data are stored safely and securely on the Enterprise Blockchain Database.
The good news is, as we discussed in the previous blog, this is no longer hype, we can do all of this today, and now, within the SAP Partner Edge Open EcoSystem there are enabling technology Blockchain Products designed and built by SAP Experts specifically for the needs of SAP Customers to make doing Blockchain and SAP easy, and so you can do SAP and Blockchain, today it's real and there's nothing stopping you.
So what are we waiting for ? Oh yeah, more use cases, ok, that will be the next blog.
What do you think, are the words AI, Blockchain, Web3, Distributed Ledger Technology, starting to appear in your Company's visions and technology visions ? What use cases are you looking at ? Let's chat about it in the comments.
For now, over and out.
Andy Silvey.
Independent SAP Technical Architect and CEO of atkrypto.io
Author Bio:
Andy Silvey is a 25 years SAP Technology veteran [15 years SAP Basis and 10 years SAP Tech Arch including Tech, Integration, Security, Data from 3.1H to S/4HANA PCE on RISE and the BTP and everything in between, and former SCN Moderator and Mentor alumni].
Andy is also co-Founder of atkrypto inc, an startup whose ambition is to make Blockchain easy for Enterprise.
atkrypto.io's flagship product is the atkrypto Enterprise Blockchain Platform for SAP, and atkrypto.io is a SAP Partner Edge Open EcoSystem Partner.
The atkrypto Enterprise Blockchain Platform for SAP has been designed by SAP Independent Experts for the needs of SAP Customers and to be deployed on the SAP BTP Kyma Runtime Service and leverage native integration to SAP Products.
atkrypto Enterprise Blockchain Platform for SAP has a number of unique qualities, including being the only Blockchain software in the world which has a DataCenter version and a light mobile version which can run on Edge/IoT/Mobile devices and enables data to be written to the Blockchain at the Edge where that same Blockchain is running on a Server in the DataCenter, protecting the integrity and originality of data from the Edge to Insights. Taking Blockchain to the Data at the Edge instead of taking the Data to the Blockchain.
- SAP Managed Tags:
2 Comments
