The current cloud storage business stands at nearly $100 billion and is controlled by a few corporations like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud but, this may change in the coming future.
Let’s understand how web3 is revolutionizing this industry. 😎
The need for decentralized storage 🤔
Traditional Cloud services have a pretty bad reputation with Data Security, frequent outages, Data Breaches, Censorship, Monitoring, and Pricing. Furthermore, your control over the data is limited. 💀
Some cloud providers are even accused of using competitors’ data without prior permission to boost personal sales.
Thankfully, Decentralized storage solves this, as it works on a P2P model!
How does the P2P model work?
Instead of being stored on a single server, your data is spread out to various nodes. The fragmented data is encrypted and the keys are completely owned by you. 🔐
The data is stored in different locations, globally and not controlled by a single entity, this makes it censorship and disaster-proof. The network validators verify if the data is stored safely and add a new block to the blockchain, also rewarding the node in form of tokens.
Each fragment or shard is given a unique hash which helps in locating the data when it needs to be retrieved, further improving the security and privacy of the cloud.
How does it compare to traditional servers?
In terms of speeds and bandwidth, P2P is the clear winner, as the data is stored at multiple locations the data is received in multiple streams instead of relying on only one stream as with Centralized systems. ⚡🚀
Security and Safe keep
Encryption and Sharding minimize the risk of data breaches, also the data can be copied to different nodes as backups. Many storage solutions have thousands of nodes/data centers worldwide. Your data can be stored in the one nearest to you, allowing higher transfer and access speeds without compromising security.
Price
You might think decentralized storage is expensive, but the price is dictated by competition, traditional providers have little to no competition enabling them to monopolize prices as per choice. 💸
Whereas, in decentralized protocols, nodes are always competing with each other in a bidding system to get potential clients on board, keeping prices in check and a win-win for both users and nodes :)
Why isn’t it mainstream yet?
The current cloud storage ecosystem is flourishing with major providers such as IPFS, Arweave, Storj, Sia, and many more but their decentralized nature also allows malicious nodes to enter the network causing minor distrust among clients while storing sensitive data.
Migration Challenges
- Corporations store huge loads of data migrating all of them at once is not possible for companies as well as the networks in these early stages.
- The current ecosystem is still in the starting phase and is expected to evolve tremendously in the coming years.
BTW, did you know Onecdot supports IPFS storage?
No?
You can check out our API docs to find out more ➡️ Onecdot NaaS
Onecdot is an Open-source lab, focused to build products to enable you to build a better web3UX.
Onec-NAAS is one such product, which handles the web3 hassle to deploy and build on NFTs on its end, and replaces them with RESTful APIs.
If you’re someone who wants to contribute to a better Web3 UX with your skills in dec, Product management, community, or Research, don’t miss out on the lab formation and join Discord now 👇