Decentralized Data Centres: Future of Cloud Computing

Recently, we have witnessed the devastating effects of IT outrages due to faulty 微软 update involving security patches by CrowdStrike which conflicted with Microsoft's cloud service infrastructure. The disruption resulted in businesses being significantly impacted including airlines which were unable to provide boarding passes to the customers.

This is not the 1st time that the businesses have faced disruptions globally. Some of Google's most popular services including YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive were down for an hour during an outage on Dec. 14, 2020. Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went dark for six hours on Oct. 4, 2021, with 10.6 million users reporting problems worldwide. Social media platform Twitter suffered a major outage on Dec. 28, 2022, leaving tens of thousands of users globally unable to access the popular social media platform or use its key features for several hours before services appeared to come back online.

All these disruptions specially with the world's best companies signifies that as we are moving in connected future where the technology globally is coming closer, the risk of disruptions are also increasing. Though we have the best of the technology companies doing their bit to ensure that the cloud infrastructures remains safe, however, it is pertinent to note that the disruptions are slowly increasing as more and more applications are getting interconnected. Though cloud computing comes with its own advantages which has indeed resulted in widespread adoption of the technology, it is worthwhile to also understand during present times whether there can be any alternative to the cloud infrastructures specially because the cloud infrastructures are becoming prone to more disruptions.

Centralized cloud computing revolutionized the digital landscape by using data centers managed by a single provider to deliver services over the Internet. This shift began in the early 2000s, led by pioneers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) with its S3 services, with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure quickly following.

The rise of the centralized cloud started slowly but saw parabolic growth at the start of the current decade. For example, FourWeekMBA puts the 2023 revenues for Amazon Web Services at an incredible $90billion, demonstrating its growing trajectory;

The benefits of centralized cloud systems are significant, helping businesses with the following:

• Scalability allows businesses to adjust resources dynamically without significant upfront investments.
• Flexibility is enhanced by the reliability of centralized clouds, offering minimal downtime and high availability.
• Security through encryption, advanced threat detection, and regulatory compliance to protect data.

However, centralized cloud computing has limitations.

For one, costs can add up as businesses continue scaling. Centralized models are also vulnerable to single points of failure; an outage in a major data center can disrupt services worldwide. Data privacy is also a concern, as relying on centralized clouds involves trusting third parties with sensitive information, an issue heightened by increased scrutiny over data breaches.

In 2023, IBM found that 82% of the breaches involved data stored in the cloud. Cloud Misconfigurations, disabled MFAs, and social engineering have been blamed for the global wave of attacks on cloud environments.

So what's the solution?

One of the best ways to tackle the evolving challenges brought by the centralized cloud infrastructure is the decentralized cloud architecture which is decentralized to the extent of geography or organisations such as a local cloud server of an organisation with its own infrastructure which may have some essential services being provided by the Cloud Service provider however, the centralized system will not have any right to enforce or push applications to the local cloud infrastructure. It will be simply like a Safe Mode in Windows wherein only essential applications are used and the user can choose other applications to run in the system. This will not just ensure better control of the organisation but also helps the organisation challenges of the centralized cloud systems.

One of the interesting validation of decentralized systems is #blockchain which validates the data from the multiple nodes connected to it. However, decentralization such as #blockchain is not feasible since the whole purpose of centralized #cloudinfrastructures is to benefit from the optimizations it brings and thus, there is a trade-off between the decentralization that can be done vis a vis the cost associated to it.

However, considering the current and past trends, it appears that decentralized cloud (#DeCloud) at an organisational level or at an geographical levels can help to avoid the upcoming challenges of the centralized cloud network while keep reaping the benefits of efficiencies that it brings on the table.

The advantages of DeCloud computing are truly transformative; they provide:

• Enhanced privacy by distributing data across numerous nodes and using end-to-end encryption reduces the risk of data breaches and unauthorized access.
• Increased cost-effectiveness as decentralized clouds often leverage peer-to-peer networks to significantly lower operational expenses compared to traditional cloud services.
• An unparalleled resilience against outages. The failure of individual nodes has minimal impact on the overall network, ensuring continuity and boosting reliability.

Thus, from the above, it can be concluded that DeCloud can be the next revolution when it comes to cloud computing due to the benefits of both centralized and decentralized network systems and thus, its worthwhile to see how the technology evolves to incorporate DeCloud in the future.

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