Enablers And Barriers to Blockchain-Enabled Cybersecurity Adoption: A Study of Organizational Readiness

Abstract

Business entities are under growing pressure to strengthen their cyber defences, and blockchain is often put forward as a means of doing so on account of its distributed record keeping, its resistance to tampering and the shared view of data it offers to every participant. This paper is an attempt to study the factors that drive organizational readiness to adopt blockchain-enabled cybersecurity solutions. Data was collected from 119 respondents through a structured questionnaire. Six constructs were measured, namely blockchain awareness, security confidence, data integrity, organizational trust, adoption readiness and implementation challenges. Descriptive statistics, the Shapiro-Wilk test of normality, Spearman rank correlation, hierarchical multiple linear regression and the one-way ANOVA of Welch were used to analyse the data. It was found that blockchain awareness, security confidence, data integrity and organizational trust together explain 49.1 per cent of the variance in adoption readiness, and that all four constructs make a positive and statistically significant contribution, with blockchain awareness being the strongest single predictor. Implementation challenges was found to be negatively and significantly correlated with adoption readiness when taken on its own, but its contribution ceased to be significant once the other four constructs were held constant. No significant difference was observed across qualification groups for any of the six constructs, which indicates that these relationships hold uniformly across educational backgrounds. The findings suggest that implementation challenges act as a background drag that overlaps with the enabling perceptions rather than as an independent barrier. The results are of relevance to information technology managers, security practitioners and researchers who are attempting to decide where to invest while building a case for blockchain-enabled cybersecurity adoption.