Most people today involve themselves heavily in a digital environment. Whether it’s hobbies, home life, work, or other reasons, most people have quite a lot of data and personal information they wish to store.
Storage clouds are the best way to save, preserve and keep large amounts of data/information. In 2017, the storage cloud industry was worth $31 billion dollars, but is expected to reach a value of more than $90 billion by the end of 2022, and a projected growth up to $380 billion by 2029.
The current leaders of the industry are Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, Google Drive, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
How cloud storage works
Files and data are uploaded to the selected server, and are stored in one direct location at a server warehouse. The account can be accessed through any server thus making the data readily available at any given location.
The management team decides how everything is to be stored, including the security methods implemented to protect the stored data.
The problems associated with cloud storage
Storage clouds fall short in several important ways.
Hosts can monitor, sensor, control, and access your personal data at any time. This violation of privacy also opens the possibility of alterations being made to your information too and gives power over your data to a company – that may not have your best interest.
Centralized storage clouds store data in a specific location that can be tracked, exposing a single point of failure, meaning a cyber attack to hack or wipe data is a real threat, especially when the server automatically stores your password for easy admin access.
On multiple occasions, storage cloud services have experienced mass crashes. In 2016, Dropbox was hacked and over 68 million passwords and private details were publicly leaked, compromising many people’s data with some losing everything.
Decentralized, blockchain cloud storage amends these issues
Blockchain based storage clouds are decentralized. They make your data accessible anywhere by distributing copies of your data across multiple computers and nodes in countless, untraceable locations. If one node were to become compromised, the blockchain would recognize that the copy doesn’t match the others, and it would immediately erase the damaged copy and replace it with another copy coherent with the others.
Here’s several other examples where blockchain storage clouds separate themselves from even the best leading services.
Zero Knowledge Encryption – Data and information is uploaded by a single entity, who creates or sometimes receives a randomly generated private key that only they will see. The cloud services provider has zero access to your data, and this private key is the only way anything can access stored information. Therefore the data is entirely yours without risk of another party compromising your private business.
The price of blockchain cloud storage becomes cheaper as it scales, making blockchain services a far more viable option for the future. Right now, the current price to store 1TB of storage on a decentralized storage cloud is $15-30 per year, whereas for the same storage space it will cost you $120-200 per year on the leading centralized cloud storages. This also helps as prices are set between renters and users, since you can also buy space and then rent it out as if it were real estate.
As it is open source, millions of devices can participate and be employed in the data distribution, creating a flawless safety net and ever expanding network. Gemini, Oasis and Filecoin are 3 of the leading three blockchain cloud storage platforms.