Decentralized Storage: Benefits of Storing Data on a Blockchain

Digital data is growing at an exponential rate. The world is generating about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily, which is only continuing to rise. For years, sites like Flickr and Instagram have allowed users to store photos and videos on their respective centralized servers. Similarly, keeping your documents on Dropbox or another cloud storage service is convenient and straightforward, but it comes with risks. The concept of centralization comes with several disadvantages that a decentralized storage solution can mitigate. 

For example, if you store your information with a third-party provider, it can be hacked or go out of business — and you might lose access to your files. Apart from that, there are plenty of examples of data breaches in centralized storage systems that lead to extortion and privacy breaches.

The Dark Side of Centralized Storage

In recent years, the media has been full of stories about data breaches, hacking attacks, and other incidents where centralized storage has proven to be less than ideal. In February 2018, for example, Facebook was forced to admit that the private data of up to 87 million users had been “improperly shared.” The social media giant reportedly paid $100,000 in compensation for each breach. 

There are many other examples of private data being put at risk by centralized storage systems: - In October 2018, it became known that Google was hit with a record-breaking fine. French authorities fined the search engine $57 million after discovering that its Google+ social network had been left with a significant security breach. - - In 2019, Amazon servers were hacked, and thousands of customers' data were in danger.

What is Decentralized Storage?

Decentralized storage is a method of storing data with no single, centralized location for all of your information. Instead, it is distributed across a network of computers — like nodes — with no single owner. This means that there is no single point of failure and no single entity that controls the data. If implemented correctly, decentralized storage offers numerous advantages over centralized data storage. 

Decentralized storage is less expensive than centralized storage options. It also gives individuals more control over their data and ensures that the information will remain accessible even if one node fails. 

Decentralized storage is also more durable than centralized storage, which can be vulnerable to natural disasters and other threats. Decentralized storage also allows you to interact with other users on the network. This helps create a strong community that can come together to ensure everyone’s data remains safe and accessible.

How Does Blockchain-based Storage Work?

Before we learn about the benefits of blockchain-based storage, let us first understand how blockchain works. A blockchain is a decentralized database not stored in a single location but replicated across a computer network. These computers are called nodes (a lot of them together make up a blockchain network). Since this network is decentralized, with no single owner, there is no single point of failure. This makes the blockchain network highly secure, tamper-proof and extremely difficult to hack. This network of nodes is also responsible for creating new records and validating the transactions taking place in the database.

Imagine storing your data on a blockchain, meaning your data is stored across the world in a network of different devices that is not accessible to anyone, even if you do not enter the private key that is used to unlock the cryptography. 

Benefits of decentralized storage

There are numerous advantages to using blockchain-based decentralized storage. Let’s explore the most important of them below. 

No single point of failure 

As we mentioned above, decentralised storage has no single point of failure. That’s because there is no single location for all of your data. So, even if one node goes down, you can access your information from another node. 

More robust security 

As there is no single point of failure, it is much harder to hack decentralized storage. The hackers will have to break into each node across the network. This is extremely difficult to do and makes decentralized storage far more secure than centralized storage.

Immunity from censorship 

Since no single entity controls the data, it is impossible for anyone to censor the information. So, you can share sensitive data without worrying about it getting into the wrong hands.

Cons of decentralized storage

Since decentralized storage is a relatively new technology, it is essential to note that it has some disadvantages too. Here are the most important ones. 

Higher costs  

Centralized storage is more cost-effective than decentralized storage. This is because decentralized networks rely on data redundancy, which requires extra computation and storage. 

Slower speeds 

Another major problem is that centralized storage is typically much faster than decentralized storage. This is because centralized networks have lower latency — i.e. when a request is made and when it is fulfilled.

Final Words

Decentralized storage is an emerging technology that will likely see many improvements in the future. It is being used by a growing number of individuals and businesses — and is also expected to play an essential role in the development of the Internet of Things (IoT). Decentralized storage is a great way to secure and protect your data, and it is also a way for individuals to take back control of their data and own their digital identity.

 

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The Best Options to Store Data and Keep it Safe Forever

In a data-driven age, such as the one we live in today, keeping our files is more or less preserving our history. Both the personal and emotional one and the professional one. All of us produce hundreds of megabytes of data every day, including photos and videos that we make with smartphones, the files we share with friends and those we work on in the office.

Yet, strangely, hardly any of us are wondering how to save data. Archiving is something very few think about and even fewer do regularly. So maybe we took thousands of photos of our children or our dog, but when we look for them, we never find them.

And, sometimes, we just don’t find them anymore. But what is the most effective, economical and long-lasting method for storing our data?

#cloud-storage #data-storage #storage #backup #options-to-store-data #store-data #data #hard-drive

Your Data Architecture: Simple Best Practices for Your Data Strategy

If you accumulate data on which you base your decision-making as an organization, you should probably think about your data architecture and possible best practices.

If you accumulate data on which you base your decision-making as an organization, you most probably need to think about your data architecture and consider possible best practices. Gaining a competitive edge, remaining customer-centric to the greatest extent possible, and streamlining processes to get on-the-button outcomes can all be traced back to an organization’s capacity to build a future-ready data architecture.

In what follows, we offer a short overview of the overarching capabilities of data architecture. These include user-centricity, elasticity, robustness, and the capacity to ensure the seamless flow of data at all times. Added to these are automation enablement, plus security and data governance considerations. These points from our checklist for what we perceive to be an anticipatory analytics ecosystem.

#big data #data science #big data analytics #data analysis #data architecture #data transformation #data platform #data strategy #cloud data platform #data acquisition

Getting Started With Data Lakes

Frameworks for Efficient Enterprise Analytics

The opportunities big data offers also come with very real challenges that many organizations are facing today. Often, it’s finding the most cost-effective, scalable way to store and process boundless volumes of data in multiple formats that come from a growing number of sources. Then organizations need the analytical capabilities and flexibility to turn this data into insights that can meet their specific business objectives.

This Refcard dives into how a data lake helps tackle these challenges at both ends — from its enhanced architecture that’s designed for efficient data ingestion, storage, and management to its advanced analytics functionality and performance flexibility. You’ll also explore key benefits and common use cases.

Introduction

As technology continues to evolve with new data sources, such as IoT sensors and social media churning out large volumes of data, there has never been a better time to discuss the possibilities and challenges of managing such data for varying analytical insights. In this Refcard, we dig deep into how data lakes solve the problem of storing and processing enormous amounts of data. While doing so, we also explore the benefits of data lakes, their use cases, and how they differ from data warehouses (DWHs).

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This is a preview of the Getting Started With Data Lakes Refcard. To read the entire Refcard, please download the PDF from the link above.

#big data #data analytics #data analysis #business analytics #data warehouse #data storage #data lake #data lake architecture #data lake governance #data lake management

Benefits of Hybrid Cloud for Data Warehouse

In today’s market reliable data is worth its weight in gold, and having a single source of truth for business-related queries is a must-have for organizations of all sizes. For decades companies have turned to data warehouses to consolidate operational and transactional information, but many existing data warehouses are no longer able to keep up with the data demands of the current business climate. They are hard to scale, inflexible, and simply incapable of handling the large volumes of data and increasingly complex queries.

These days organizations need a faster, more efficient, and modern data warehouse that is robust enough to handle large amounts of data and multiple users while simultaneously delivering real-time query results. And that is where hybrid cloud comes in. As increasing volumes of data are being generated and stored in the cloud, enterprises are rethinking their strategies for data warehousing and analytics. Hybrid cloud data warehouses allow you to utilize existing resources and architectures while streamlining your data and cloud goals.

#cloud #data analytics #business intelligence #hybrid cloud #data warehouse #data storage #data management solutions #master data management #data warehouse architecture #data warehouses

Blockchain in Covid: How is it Benefitting the Pharmaceutical and Logistics Companies?

Full blog: Here

It was December 2019 when the novel coronavirus pandemic hit the globe like a storm. All the nations worldwide were looking towards the pharmaceutical industry for a vaccine that will combat the virus.

To a surprise, developed nations and some developing countries like India made this possible within a year by developing their own vaccine to address the novel coronavirus. While some have vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna, others have Covishield, Covaxin, and Sputnik.

News of the vaccine trials brought a sigh of relief to billions of people worldwide, but many were also concerned about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. Jason Kelley, says, “A vaccine is not effective unless and until it is not distributed and trusted by customers.”

For this, manufacturers and logistics companies delivering the vaccines heavily rely on blockchain technology to empower the vaccination distribution network to inject speed, accountability, and infuse transparency across the system. Due to this, the blockchain development companies India have come into their own.

With the blog, you will get to know the benefits of Blockchain in vaccine drive and how it effectively monitors and strengthens the system in Covid times.

#blockchain benefits in covid #blockchain in covid #blockchain-benefits-in-covid-vaccine-drive #blockchain companies in india #blockchain-benefits