Sometimes it can be difficult to convey how something complex works. I have been working in IT for over 40 years and have found that trying to explain how something works can result in strange looks on faces. For instance, trying to explain to an 80-year-old grandmother how to use a phone line to send an email to her grandchild in college can be quite daunting. Drawing a correlation between traditional United States postal mail and sending an email can lead to questions like where you place a stamp, why you don’t need their street address, and even what the proper salutation is to start the letter.
We all know that IT is growing at a speed that is harder and harder to keep up with every day. Not long ago, we were just understanding the concept of a data center. The thrust into the cloud era has left many people confused. It doesn’t help that right on the back of cloud computing and cloud storage, we are now talking about artificial intelligence, bitcoin, blockchain, neural networks, large language models, ChatGPT, autonomous cars, and smart devices, not to mention countless acronyms like AI, IPFS, CID, ML, AGI, AR, XR, Q-Bit, RPA, and IoT just to name a few.
As we step into the world of Decentralized storage, there isn't a better time for a good analogy. Storing data in a decentralized storage platform can be complex, to say the least, and many Storage Providers (SPs) that are way smarter than I am are paving the way to make things easier like encryption, simple drag-and-drop capabilities or an easy S3 interface to help traditional cloud storage users make the jump to the next revolutionary era for the storage industry.
So here you go.
A Decentralized Storage Analogy:
Remember long ago when your big sister had a diary where she wrote all of her secrets? It was always intriguing to try and find out who she was writing about, who she was thinking of when she was daydreaming at the dinner table, or what her real thoughts about her younger brother (me) were. It was easy to get to the diary; you would just walk into her room and pick it up off her desk. That’s pretty much how it was with data long ago. It was just sitting on a computer, and you could just grab it.
Just like my sister, storage managers got smart. They started putting locks on their diaries, so to speak. They began encrypting files in a manner that made them more complex to break into, just like the lock on my sister’s new diary. It was a little intimidating, which kept me from looking into it—until she started dating that guy named Tim. The information she was writing in that book became too valuable for me to ignore just because there was a silly lock on the cover. It took me a little while, but I finally broke the lock and was able to read all about her boyfriend. The same thing happened in the IT industry. The security of data became compromised, and people wondered what to do.
Continuing with the diary analogy, what came next in the IT industry was very similar to my sister taking her valuable diary and giving it to her friend. She figured that if it wasn’t in the house, it would be better protected from me trying to break into it. This is exactly what the industry did. They took all their valuable data, packaged it up, and shipped it to the cloud. What they didn’t realize is that instead of worrying about someone on premises, they now had to worry about everybody. Just like my sister’s diary—now her friend, her friend’s brothers and sisters, friends over at the house, mom, and even her friend’s creepy dad could all have an opportunity to try and look at my sister’s diary. Yeah, it was still encrypted with a tiny lock covering the whole book. But what good did that do if you really stop and think about it?
The story gets worse because a couple of months later, she got in a nasty fight with her friend, who decided that my sister wasn’t playing by the rules of friendship and decided to keep her diary for her own personal use. She started telling others all the private information that was in the diary, because after all, it was at her house, and since it was at her friend’s house, she could do whatever she wanted with it. This is where we are today. We put our data into the cloud, and then we just hope and pray that we don’t upset the current providers to the point that they can take our data and start distributing it. And if we look closely enough, we might actually find out that some of them are doing it anyway because it is written into a contract that we didn’t realize. This is where decentralized storage comes into play.
What if my sister could avoid all these problems by instead of trusting one person, she trusted nobody? What if she took the diary, tore it into thousands of pages, and then distributing them across many locations scattered around the world? That is exactly what decentralized storage does. If anyone happened to find one single page, they wouldn’t know what it was. Now, the cool thing about Decentralized storage is that you can build on top of this with many features. A good example is that Storage Providers added things like encryption. So, every page of the diary is locked. Even if someone managed to unlock that page, they would have no idea what it pertained to, who it belonged to, or even the rest of the story. If you think about it, the concept of distributing information in such a manner that nobody was trusted, but many people held some fraction of the data, and even those people were not associated with each other, so there was no way for them to hold back, take ransom, or hold you hostage to any of the data you provided, would be the true sense of decentralized storage. The icing on the cake is that all those people holding onto a fragment of your diary would let you know every single day that your pages are safe and secure.
This is exactly what happens with decentralized storage. When you store data in a decentralized platform, all good Storage Providers will make sure the data is encrypted during transfer, as well as at rest. Any passing of crypto keys would be encrypted as well for securing any transactions for placing data or withdrawing data from decentralized storage. Next, by the nature of decentralized storage, the data is broken up into what they call shards. Those shards are then distributed across a decentralized network. Robust SP's will build servers that are not only highly available but also enterprise-grade, providing redundancy to eliminate a single point of failure. Another benefit is that by default, multiple copies are made of your data, which can be retrieved from the nearest location for faster recovery. Every bit of data that is written is confirmed daily to make sure that the data is still in place and hasn’t changed one bit, giving the end-user a sense of security. Many cloud providers like to claim that your data is backed up, but no one really shows proof of it, not on a daily basis for sure. Unlike some cloud providers, decentralized storage offers daily proof of data integrity. Keep in mind, cloud providers write the data a single time. If something happens to that data center, the server, or the tape, your data is lost.
So there you go, perhaps the easiest way to understand decentralized storage is to look at how such a new, transformative technology cannot only change the way you protect your sister’s personal diary but how you protect the critical information that runs your business. Do you really want to trust your data to a single entity, whether it is in your own data center or a major cloud provider? The chances are, you would much rather trust nobody, and the way to do that is through decentralized storage. You hold the keys, you have the access, and you hold the destiny of your data. Data that nobody can see, understand, or even piece together without the keys that only you possess.