New Delhi, Feb 2 (IANS): Blockchain technology has benefits across the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) sector, retail, Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud and the government should promote it towards realising its goal of digitally transforming the country, top industry leaders said on Friday.

Blockchain is a distributed digital technology -- that supports crypto currencies -- and is adept for businesses where large amounts of data is transferred, updated and filtered by multiple users.

"Microsoft Azure Cloud has been powering the exponential and disruptive growth of Blockchain and believes the convergence of public and private Blockchains to an ecosystem. It can already be seen that its potential to reach across non-financial sectors is staggering in India," Microsoft India said in a statement.

"Looking ahead, Microsoft is working with customers, partners, and the developer community to accelerate Blockchain's enterprise readiness," the company added.

For Sunil Sharma, Managing Director, Sales for Sophos India and Saarc, it was no wonder that Blockchain technology got a special emphasis in the Union Budget.

"With the rise in Bitcoin's popularity and a strong warning to act with 'extreme caution', the significant risks of choosing to invest in crypto currencies is apparent," Sharma said.

Raja Raman, Vice President at Sapient Consulting, said that with an emphasis to bring technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), data analytics, Machine Learning (ML), 3D Printing and Blockchain in focus, they are positive that this move will strengthen India's advancement towards becoming a digital nation.

"We also like the move to de-hyphenate Blockchain from crypto currencies in general and investing further in Blockchain while limiting misuse of crypto currencies," Raman added.

Rajesh Rege, Managing Director, Red Hat, India and Saarc, said he is looking forward to an early implementation of AI and Blockchain initiatives.

Rostow Ravanan, CEO at Mindtree, said that the government's interest and budget allocations to areas like Blockchain could be a big opportunity for using technology to deliver superior outcomes.

According to cyber security firm Symantec, Blockchain technology is poised to find uses outside of crypto currencies in 2018 and expand its functions in inter-bank settlements with the help of IoT gaining traction.

"However, these use cases are still in their infancy stage and are not the focus for most cyber criminals today," Symantec said.

Instead of attacking Blockchain technology itself, cyber criminals would focus on compromising coin exchanges and users' coin wallets since these are the easiest targets and provide high returns, it added.