Blockchain and Data Management Security for Sustainable Digital Ecosystems: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Blockchain has been widely proposed to strengthen data management security through decentralization, immutability, and auditable transactions, capabilities increasingly recognized as enablers of sustainable digital ecosystems and resilient institutions; however, existing studies remain dispersed across domains and rarely consolidate governance, interoperability, and evaluation criteria. This paper conducts a systematic literature review of 70 peer-reviewed studies published between 2018 and 2024, using IEEE Xplore, Scopus, Springer, ScienceDirect, and ACM Digital Library as primary sources and following Kitchenham’s guidelines and the PRISMA 2020 flow, to examine how blockchain has been applied to secure data in healthcare, IoT, smart cities, supply chains, and cloud environments. The analysis identifies four methodological streams—empirical implementations, cryptographic/security protocols, blockchain–machine learning integrations, and conceptual frameworks—and shows that most contributions are technology-driven, with limited attention to standard metrics, regulatory compliance, and cross-platform integration. In addition, the review reveals that very few works articulate governance models that align technical solutions with organizational policies, which creates a gap for institutions seeking trustworthy, auditable, and privacy-preserving deployments. The review contributes a structured mapping of effectiveness criteria (confidentiality, auditability, availability, and compliance) and highlights the need for governance models and interoperable architectures to move from prototypes to production systems. Future work should prioritize large-scale validations, policy-aligned blockchain solutions, and comparative evaluations across sectors.