Distributed cloud – the people’s internet
Art imitating life, imitating art is not a new concept and when the art in question is a TV show that tracks the latest technology, is set in - and named - “Silicon Valley” it’s perhaps unsurprising that one of the storylines from the show has the potential to come to life in the real world. In this case the art in question is the distribution of data across end devices, rather than silo-ed in servers.
The power of data has come to rise in the past few years, with almost all traditional services now available from online sources. From TV and movies, shopping and even gambling it’s fair to say the majority of us rely on the internet for many of our daily activities, but what happens when the lights of these services turn off? Loss of service is something that the providers are constantly battling, with mirrored server farms across different continents, failover networking and even the "Simian Army" being deployed to ensure that downtime is kept to a minimum. But while these tools for resilience become smarter and more intelligent, the issues still remains that the provider is the owner and the single point of failure, if their systems are compromised the data is at risk. This is where both distributed ledger and empowered edge technologies, with the help of 5G, can converge.
Now that the majority of us are walking around with supercomputers in our pockets, with most never coming close to filling the data storage capacity, there seems to be an opportunity to better utilise these resources while providing a service for the benefit of all users. It's not an alien concept after all, subletting of apartments and even flexible shared workspaces where you "rent a desk" all sit in the same ballpark - utilising previously unused space. It's just this time the tenants are data and you are the landlord!
With distributed ledger technology the data could be divided into tiny portions that could be secured and shared across thousands of devices which would both add resilience and increase the security that no single device held all the data for "x" while also ensuring the availability [if a device is offline for example]. It would mean that these providers could leverage the power of their own users to store, serve and secure the very data that they are paying to access. Easier still if this storage service was built into the provider's app.
Removing the risk of downtime is so important to online businesses, especially those streaming data and anything to add to the arsenal to combat it - a bit like a backup generator - must be something providers would jump at.
As with all technological advances there will be trial and error, but as we are all looking at efficiencies and improvements in processes surely reducing the carbon footprint of data centres - already accounting for 2% of electricity consumption worldwide - is a step in the right direction.
