Since the last decade, cloud computing has received massive popularity among tech enterprises. Companies that had to spend sometimes millions of dollars on storage and servers, can now conveniently outsource such resources to cloud platforms and observe enormous cost savings. The cloud computing industry has seen massive growth rates; Gartner, predicts that the worldwide public cloud services will be a $302 billion market by 2021. It grew at a rate of 21.4% in 2018 to a total of $186.4 billion.
It is now 2020, and the world of cloud computing is centralized around very few players:
Jeff Bezos saw an opportunity and entered the cloud business, and as of the third quarter of 2019, Amazon Web Services stole the show. The business grew 35% in sales to $9.0 billion. Microsoft entered the game after AWS, followed by Google. These three tech giants control the cloud market share today and from the looks of it so far, this will continue to be the trend in the near future.
Outages in Cloud Computing
Several large and small companies are now heavily dependent on cloud services. It helps them save money by outsourcing their storage needs to other cloud platforms. There are other several benefits to this: reduced costs in IT, scalability, efficiency in collaboration and many more. However, since the market has been centralized around very few players, an outage in one of these platforms could lead to severe damages. In fact, in 2017, Amazon S3, a popular web hosting service, had a mega-outage which caused several websites to go offline by shutting down their backend storage. Companies like Salesforce, Dockers, Medium, Gitlab, Zendesk, Citrix, Twilio and hundreds of others were affected by the disruption. Recently, an error in Google’s cloud servers caused a disruption for Snapchat, Shopify and even our very own Pokemon GO (imagine a world without that!!). This leads us to believe that even though the internet seems to be decentralized and easily accessible by everyone, it is dependent on the architectural backing of a small number of players in the market. This results in a vast amount of power in the hands of few. In the future, as more companies continue to avail several cloud services, it will not only create a cloud monopoly among the major players but also lead to several damages in case there is another outage with no risk mitigation opportunities for these companies to rely on. This also leads to several other more important questions around data privacy, ownership and control.
What is the solution?
This points to a very significant discussion in today’s tech driven-world: how can a centralized cloud be decentralized. A few blockchain companies have been working on answering this question and providing solutions to decentralize the cloud. They are effectively utilizing blockchain technology to store data and ensure that it is encrypted. The main aim of these companies is for us to live in a world where millions of computers are connected in a decentralized fashion without any control from the big tech players. This ensures that our data is secure and protected; now doesn’t that sound appealing to all of us?
DeepCloud AI
Now let’s observe an example of a company that is trying to achieve decentralized cloud computing. DeepCloud AI is “Leading the blockchain space in decentralized cloud and edge computing utilizing cutting-edge AI.” The mission of the company is to build a decentralized cloud computing platform to run decentralized applications. This company shows a lot of promise for the future of cloud computing and could be a real threat to AWS and Microsoft Azure. They have come up with a very smart algorithm that uses blockchain and AI to develop a decentralized cloud that collects excess computing power and data storage and allocates it to other consumers. Data storage is only finite in today’s world and this technology really provides a solution to that problem.
There are several use cases for this platform, however, the one that I found the most intriguing is around supply chain. Companies which have a complex supply chain tracking system can deploy their blockchain based applications on the DeepCloud AI platform. This ensures secure tracking of all transactions with proper audit trails. There are several advantages to using this technology: since it is blockchain based, one can decentralize control and increase the safety and protection of data. It allows for a significantly higher number of transactions with increasingly lower costs.
Edge Computing
As reported by Statista, by 2025, the total IoT connected devices are projected to be at approximately 75 billion. This leads us to believe that there are barriers to centralized cloud computing in today’s connected world. It could potentially lead to bandwidth and latency related issues. There is only so much data that can be processed and stored in the central cloud and the large transmission of data could also lead to large latencies. A decentralized cloud model also provides solutions to such problems which we will be confronted with very soon! There are vast amounts of computing resources at the edge and are mostly sitting in an idle state. Processing this data leads to a phenomenon termed as edge cloud: “Edge computing is computing that’s done at or near the source of the data, instead of relying on the cloud at one of a dozen data centers to do all the work. It doesn’t mean the cloud will disappear. It means the cloud is coming to you.” It is millions of times larger than all central cloud resources we have today, and the decentralized infrastructure breaks the boundaries between clients and servers and forms several fluffy clouds!
Conclusion
The world is rapidly evolving with companies and individuals relying more and more on technology. This leads to the creation of massive amounts of data and there is a need to effectively and securely manage that data. With data privacy, among other relevant factors, being of utmost importance to consumers today, there is a critical need for decentralization. With Mirai IoT Botnet infecting over 600,000 vulnerable devices, there is an increasing need for secure platforms. With a decentralized cloud backed by Blockchain, such threats will no longer be of concern to us! Centralized cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft should up their game and find ways to integrate with the innovations in blockchain technology. The application of blockchain extends beyond just payments and will be the Tech-Superman for our generation!
Strategy in the Age of Decentralization 