Everything is moving to the cloud. We hear this all the time. Especially since more people than ever are currently working from home and ordering things online thanks to the various responses to COVID. All of that online activity has been generating piles and piles of data, so much so that data storage companies have had to scramble to deal with it. Thus, new data centers, located in massive but otherwise innocuous buildings full of server stacks are springing up.
There are a lot of interesting and counterintuitive aspects to this trend. One is that our increasingly digital lives are causing a small boom in brick and mortar construction. Because of the obvious need for extensive electrical and HVAC capabilities these data centers can’t be easily installed in a refurbished warehouse or old office building. They often need a brand new building to be able to handle all the unique demands of a modern data center. This creates construction jobs and a few others in security and IT to keep the servers working.
Another unusual aspect to consider is the fact that the cloud isn’t really a cloud. Sure, when you upload a document to the cloud, it is easy to share with others and access from anywhere with an internet connection. However, that document is still stored in a specific physical location. In a way, the cloud as it currently exists is actually more centralized than ever. Stay with me on this. Before everything was getting put on the cloud, your information was typically kept just in your hard drive and the drive of anyone you shared it with. That is pretty siloed and keeps it out of the hands of people who might benefit from access to it. Yet, data as a whole was more spread out, over several different drives in multiple buildings, each possibly with its own servers.
This made it more difficult to share but also to hack the data. A single accident like a power surge was unlikely to wipe out vast swaths of data. Now, with the cloud and increasing amounts of data stored in these massive server farms it is in faact easier to hack, or be lost due to happenstance. How should we deal with this situation? What alternatives are there since it is unlikely we’ll be going back to the old model. After all, the cloud model has provided numerous advantages in cost savings and data sharing efficiency. For now at least, it seems we need those massive centers full of server stacks. Yet, this is merely a temporary fix, a band aid.
The question then remains, what is a better solution for this situation? The answer lies in the continued drive to decentralization. If cloud computing arose from a need to decentralize work, the solution to how to best handle all that data should lie in the same direction. While the details still need to be worked out, solutions that make use of blockchain technology are the most likely. These would make use of this cryptocurrency technology to harness the storage and computing power of devices large and small across the planet. Imagine if millions worldwide signed up to a system that would dedicate a portion of the storage and computing capacity of their smartphones and laptops to cloud computing. Each one functions as a node in a massive network.
These kinds of systems already exist. The oldest of note is SETI which began allowing people to hook up their computers to the SETI data network over a decade ago. These computers process data from SETI during what would otherwise be downtime, allowing that data to be processed much more quickly and efficiently than if it was just waiting for time at centralized supercomputers. The same method has been used in other capacities such as decoding genomes. So, why not apply the same principle to cloud computing generally?
This is exactly in line with TARTLE’s vision. We’re trying to help build a world in which data is not controlled by the few but by the many, by the people who create it in the first place. It’s just one part in the decentralization movement, a movement that aims to put people back in control of their own data and lives.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
