Blockchain technology for cloud storage: This looks like the future

There’s been a lot of excitement over blockchain technology and its relation to finance, especially regarding bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin‘s value skyrocketed in 2017, ending the year with a value of more than $14,000 after starting 2017 at just over $1,000. And it’s not the only cryptocurrency to see huge increases over the years. While some believe that cryptocurrencies are just another bubble waiting to burst, others see them as the future of finance. What happens if we consider blockchain technology for cloud storage? That’s just what many startups are beginning to do.

As we know, storage infrastructure has transformed to generally being very centralized. Rather than businesses and corporations hosting their own servers, many have migrated to the cloud. This turn toward centralization lets companies push workloads to larger, public clouds in order to utilize the storage infrastructure of large companies, like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

Because of the centralization currently inherent in cloud computing, resources could be shared and the end customer could have much lower costs and higher efficiency and uptime. With this, cloud computing has massively grown, with Gartner claiming that the “cloud shift” will affect more than $1 trillion in IT spending by 2020.

No one is doubting the benefits of cloud computing. However, data breaches or service interruptions aren’t unheard of, or even uncommon. Whether it’s user error or issues with the hosts themselves, data breaches in 2017 were a major story.

For example, Verizon partnered with Nice Systems to handle customer service calls who utilized an unprotected Amazon S3 storage server. Because of this, 6 million records that held logs from customers who called Verizon customer service were able to be accessed.

Another much more massive leak occurred when Deep Roots Analytics misconfigured their AWS server, releasing sensitive information of 198 million Americans. These failures aren’t a one-time occurrence and they show that cloud computing’s model of centralized storage isn’t as secure as it could be because it has a single point of failure.

If you are storing your company’s information in the cloud, you are placing a very large amount of trust in these third parties, particularly if your data is especially sensitive. That’s why many are predicting that, even though centralized cloud computing has many numerous advantages, the cloud might switch to a distributed, decentralized approach. And this is where blockchain technology for cloud storage enters the picture.

Cycling back to the idea of client-server computing, workloads will still be centrally managed and controlled with a blockchain approach. Essentially, even if processing the data is physically distributed, the workloads remain logically centralized.

This is different than a hybrid cloud approach where companies maintain data both on the public and private cloud. Blockchain creates a decentralized and distributed storage marketplace.

Blockchain technology for cloud storage can be a rather complex data structure to understand. This graphic from Blockgeeks helps explain it a bit.