Blockchain solves one problem well: allowing parties who do not fully trust each other to agree on a shared history without a central authority. If your use case does not have that property, a database will be faster, cheaper, and easier to operate.
The clearest fit is multi-party traceability. Supply chains, provenance records, and certification registries involve several organisations, each with their own systems and reasons to distrust the others' records. A shared tamper-evident ledger gives all of them the same history.
Tokenised assets and programmable settlement are a genuine fit where value transfer and business logic need to execute atomically without an intermediary. This is the basis of most credible DeFi applications.
The poor fit is internal record-keeping. A single organisation storing its own data on a chain it controls has added latency, cost, and operational complexity in exchange for guarantees it already had. This describes a large share of enterprise blockchain pilots that quietly ended.
Architecturally, the durable pattern is on-chain for what needs verification, off-chain for everything else. Commit hashes and custody events to the chain; keep documents, images, and bulk data in object storage. This keeps costs predictable and avoids putting business-sensitive data on a public ledger.
Smart contract security deserves proportionate treatment because deployed contracts are difficult to change and directly control value. Independent audit before mainnet deployment is not optional, and an explicit upgrade and governance path should be designed rather than improvised.
The practical question to ask before starting: if we removed the chain and used a shared database with strong audit logging, what specifically would we lose? If the answer is nothing concrete, that is a useful signal.