The adoption of cloud technology has eliminated the traditional need for companies to spend tons of money on physical servers and data warehouses. We no longer need to store important information and resources on hardware devices when we can upload them to the cloud and access them as needed. Prominent centralized cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud are doing a great job of growing and continuing to develop. However, with the ongoing innovations of blockchain technology, the idea of a decentralized cloud is arising. Yes, we have cloud technology but they are still governed by centralized entities that act as an intermediary for what we utilize with the cloud. How are things changing to make individuals fully own what they use?

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis.

Organizations of every type, size, and industry are using the cloud for a wide variety of use cases such as data backup, disaster recovery, email, virtual desktops, software development, data analytics, and customer-facing web applications. For example, healthcare companies are using the cloud to develop more personalized treatments for patients. Financial services companies are using the cloud to power real-time fraud detection and prevention. Video game developers are using the cloud to deliver online games to millions of players around the world.

When we use the cloud for things like cloud storage, centralized providers hold the keys to our environments and can access them at any time. They can also hand over our information if a government agency ever requested our data. Since centralized providers use a public cloud, this technically makes our information public and subject to data mining.

Centralized providers can also experience outages and downtime like what happened with AWS making our information inaccessible. Some users could even lose their information or have it leaked in the event of a cyberattack or exploit.

These providers also charge fees for their services. Fees may not mean much to larger companies, but smaller companies can be impacted by them.

Decentralized cloud storage providers leverage the infrastructure that is designed to eliminate central authority. These providers typically also utilize a permissionless structure built upon the blockchain that allows developers to employ their services with reduced restrictions.

This entails a peer-to-peer network for cloud marketplace that users can join to use cloud services or to provide their excess resources such as for computing, networking, storage, etc. to others. Decentralized cloud infrastructure manages the host and deployment of these cloud services.

Decentralized cloud services offer reliability by spreading data across multiple cloud storage devices in a variety of places. This process helps solve the issue of centralized providers hosting data in a single data warehouse. Traditional providers offer the feature of spreading data across regions but it can get expensive. A decentralized cloud makes it more cost-effective to do so.

Akash’s platform can access cloud computing at up to three times less than the cost of centralized cloud providers

Smart contracts allow clients to ensure that multiple copies of their data are backed up via redundancy — the practice of storing multiple copies of a particular piece of data in multiple different locations. The smart contracts are then stored on and enforced by various blockchains which will keep this information accessible.

The security of these decentralized cloud providers become more advanced due to blockchain technology. They are deployed using an edge-based security model in which data is encrypted, distributed, and given 100% control by the user. Essentially, you don’t have much to worry about.

Here’s a brief overview of some popular Decentralized Cloud Providers.

Akash Network is the world’s first decentralized and open-source cloud. They offer fast, efficient, and low-cost application deployment solutions. Akash encourages builders to deploy decentralized cloud applications through their infrastructure. When traditional cloud storage providers have excess capacity, they can sell it on Akash Network’s blockchain-based marketplace to maximize the output of their unused resources. So far, they already leverage 85% of underutilized cloud capacity in 8.4 million global data centers, enabling anyone to buy and sell cloud computing. Akash has a broad ecosystem of projects and is continuing to develop while improving interoperability.

Their network is built on the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), a decentralized network that allows for storing and sharing data in a peer-to-peer way. In return, they’ll be compensated with AKT, the native token of the Akash Network. This decentralized approach to cloud computing has a number of advantages over traditional centralized systems.

Aleph.im is a cross-blockchain decentralized storage and computing network that provides server-less computing services, file storage, and databases. It is meant to be a decentralized alternative similar to AWS Lambda. They are focused on decentralizing the “middleware” layer of decentralized applications making the middleware run on different nodes instead of being on one central point.

They offer a variety of use cases such as IPFS, website hosting, document certification/management system, NFT metadata storing, social media censorship resisting, and more. They plan to “supercharge” DeFi by accessing assets of all supported chains, interoperating with projects built on any of the supported chains, onboarding users of all supported chains, and removing centralized dependencies such as cloud databases.

Flux is a suite of decentralized computing services and blockchain-as-a-service solutions (BaaS). They have several components that make up their ecosystem like FluxOS, a second-layer operating system that allows hardened dockerized apps to run on Flux’s fully decentralized computational network. FluxNodes is another component that lets developers develop, manage, and spawn applications on multiple servers at once. Zelcore is their blockchain app suite, and their own blockchain for on-chain governance, economics, and assets to provide interoperability with other blockchains.

Flux has implemented a mechanism of parallel assets that will live on other blockchains, they will capitalize on the beneficial features of each blockchain without having to depend on any of them. Known apps like AAVE, DocuShield, and Liquity are currently running on Flux and their list continues to expand.

The demand for decentralized cloud services is rapidly growing as the evolution of new platforms increases the flexibility and scalability of blockchain technology. The benefits of utilizing these options outweigh the centralized resources we have by a landslide. We are slowly but surely shifting into an era where we have more control as individuals. These solutions create a new lane for us to continue to do what has been done in a more controllable fashion.

Having sovereignty over the applications we use and the data we store is very important. It's amazing to see more puzzle pieces link together to eliminate centralized authority and give individuals more ownership of things we use every day. This also opens the door for accessibility amongst different players, whether big or small.

subscribe://