By Ashish Nanjiani, Sr. Director and Head of Cloud Platforms, Rakuten India
Imagine a day where we will have a public cloud that is not controlled or managed by a single vendor, where the uptime and data integrity is 100% guaranteed, and where the security is as strong as an iron rod. A global supercomputer with “unlimited” capacity and processing power and available 24×7. Sounds like a dream? It may appear so, however, this dream is now shaping up to become real with the introduction of a decentralized cloud.
While still a distant away for enterprises to adopt, the foundation for the same has been laid. As humans, we have been trained to live in a controlled and centralized world. A centralized bank gives us much comfort to store our savings as compared to storing our savings with individuals. We trust centralized institutions like schools, and colleges to educate our kids as compared to trusting individual(s).
The same goes for the way we would like to be governed. We trust a centralized government to take care of all citizens. The fundamental reason behind the existence of centralized institutions is “Trust”. We trust that the bank will take care of our money. We trust that the schools will provide the best education for our kids and we trust the government will work for the people. However, time and again, we have witnessed this trust gets broken and we humans have to suffer for this breach of trust. What if the same trust can be provided not by centralized institutions run by few humans but by technology? The rise of blockchain-based Dapps (decentralized applications) in the last couple of years has given us this alternative. Powered by blockchain technology, these Dapps provide us the same level of trust that a bank provides to conduct a financial transaction.
The difference being there is no single person, institution, or enterprise which is providing this trust. The trust is provided by underlying blockchain technology. The same trust if extended to other areas of our lives, can change the world. Today there are many Dapps that offer a trusted and decentralized alternative to many popular social media sites, search engines, financial applications, news sites, and much more. With the control moving from a single entity to distributed set of entities, this is just the beginning of a new decentralized but trusted world.
So, what about the cloud? If we go back to trace the origin of the public cloud, it was Amazon who first gave the world a taste of at-scale centralized infrastructure service which can satisfy the world’s hunger of compute with unlimited capacity. Companies rushed for a cheap and faster infrastructure provider, and we all know how this changed the world.
Today, cloud computing is defacto for any company. However, if you ask any CEO around the world, there is one apprehension! (while hidden but a fact). Can you trust one company with all your data? This apprehension led to the evolution of multi-cloud where instead of trusting one company, you hedge the risk across many companies. This is the same as we do while buying stocks. But still, there is no 100% guarantee given these companies are bounded by government laws and regulations and controlled by the board of directors, and work for the shareholders.
So how does decentralized cloud help? Let us take the example of storage. In a very layman’s language, instead of storing all your data within a single vendor data center, you can distribute this data across thousands of vendors who are distributed across the globe. However, the question which comes to mind is can you trust these unknown vendors with your data? What about data integrity and security? This is where blockchain comes into play. Blockchain technology provides transaction privacy or the “Trust” while decentralized storage helps store files securely. Decentralized storage systems divide the data into multiple blocks and encrypt each block with a hash or public/private keys. It then allocates these blocks across various systems and nodes (vendors). Since no single vendor or storage provider has complete data and the data is encrypted, it is impossible for anyone to hack complete data and make sense of the same.
Further, since there are multiple copies of data available across multiple nodes, so you not only get redundancy but also speed to retrieve data. And the best part is, no government, no company, and no individual can alter, freeze or compromise your data. All this is at a fraction of the cost of what you will pay for a single vendor-based solution. While the benefit of using a decentralized cloud seems to be exciting, it is still in the naïve stages of maturity. Not only is the technology still evolving, but a decentralized network also has its own issues. Given there is no single owner or a company, when things go downhill there is no single neck to choke.
While data security is guaranteed, data can be compromised if the private key details get into the wrong hands. What about compliance and liability? Support becomes another issue if the end user needs to reach out for deployment or other operational issues. Monitoring applications and infrastructure across the decentralized network becomes another challenge to solve.
The future of decentralized cloud is certainly very exciting and encouraging. It has given a way forward to establish trust without the need for a centralized institution. It is only a matter of time before this technology will change the world once again!