Inverting the Cloud
Why your users should store their own data
Today, it is standard for software companies to store all of their users’ data, whether it’s a couple megabytes or multiple terabytes of information. For companies that sell user data, this is a major asset. For most others, this is a serious liability. After continual large-scale data breaches and privacy leaks at some of the largest and most critical services on the web, we need to consider a more secure system in which users store their own data.
Giving users control of their data may seem infeasible or impractical, but it’s entirely possible — and it could provide more utility than just freeing your company from liability. At Aspen, we believe building software is faster, easier, and stress-free when you focus on your product and not how to handle your users information. Aspen’s framework for storing user data will make your life easier as a developer and also give you new tools and abilities to grow and scale your application.
Bootstrapping your app
When a user signs into an application for the first time, it’s essential that they can immediately find the most compelling ways to use your product. One of the best ways to do this is by demonstrating what they can do on your platform with their existing data or connections. When a user’s data is consolidated in one place, on a single platform, new applications can bootstrap with data the user already has. New customers can quickly discover if your service works for them without long trial periods or extensive onboarding.
Leveraging the cloud
The benefits of cloud-native apps reach both developers and users. Fast updates, easy installs, and syncing data between devices: what’s not to like? These features have become the standards of modern applications. If your users were to store their own data, you might think they would be sacrificing portability for privacy. That may be true if their data was stored locally, only on a single device; however, if your users have their own personal cloud database, you can harness the best features of modern applications while preserving users’ privacy and removing all of the complexity of building a great cloud experience.
Simplifying your development
With Aspen’s data model, you can forget about the cost and complexity of clusters of machines and distributed systems required to handle user data at scale. Managing data for one user is immensely easier than managing data for one million. When users store their own data, your app only has to consider one user at a time: you won’t need to handle complex authentication, authorization, or growing storage requirements. In fact, for many apps you could simply use Aspen to individually connect to each of your users databases and forgo a server entirely. You can create new documents, save, and query them directly with Aspen’s developer kit. And as your app requires more complex features, it’s easy to extend the capabilities of your app with the software deployed on existing platforms, you’re used to, like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
Creating an integrated ecosystem
One of the benefits that a user gets by sticking to a single ecosystem is the tightly integrated set of services that companies like Google can provide. Google has the ability to display your events from your calendar in Google Maps to help you navigate to your appointment or use the Google Assistant to notify you of flight delays from booking confirmations in your Gmail — these integrations are both helpful and welcomed by users. However, this level of integration is controlled by the arbiters of our data. If, instead, a user could run their applications directly from their own personal database, they would expect one of their apps to be aware of activity done in another even if it were published by a different developer. Users appreciate this level of integration if their privacy is respected but implementing this in your app can be complex or impossible.
Currently, there are few open platforms that allow user data to be easily transferred from one service to another, creating seamless experience across multiple company’s apps. You can’t simply move your music library from Spotify to Apple Music or merge your iMessages and Instagram DM’s. On the other hand, email is an exemplar of data portability: the standardization of protocols in email enables users to freely move their old emails to new platforms easily. This paradigm has reduced the barriers to entry for new email clients and fostered healthy competition which has led to better services for consumers and extensive developer tools and integrations. But in tech, email is the exception to the rule. One can’t create an alternative client for Google Docs or Facebook Messenger because those systems are completely closed or have limited APIs.
I want to feel that I own things. A lot of people feel, ‘Oh, everything is really on my computer,’ but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it.” — Steve Wozniak
Preserving privacy and security
Most consumer protections (GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA) on the web are focused on protecting users’ data and ensuring their privacy. These regulations have made it much easier for users to control and understand what information of theirs is captured and sold by the services they use. However, it did not make things simpler for the providers of those services. Ensuring and maintaining compliance is expensive and distracts from building your product but the cost of non-compliance can sink your business. When you build applications that don’t store user data, you avoid these problems completely. There would be no need to process data requests from your users, no reason to audit your databases, and no privacy lawyers necessary to grow your business; your users could securely and independently locate all of their personal data without your intervention.
Another advantage to distributing data to each user is that it reduces the incentives for hackers. Companies that hold troves of private data are constant targets of cyber attacks. The Aspen model thwarts the hacker’s business: bad actors would have to infiltrate user accounts one-by-one to collect the same quantity of data held by a traditional web app — an exponential increase in required time and effort.
Making it happen
The benefits of giving users control of their data are apparent — the next part is making this a reality. In order to fulfill the requirements detailed above, the solution needs to be able to run on many devices, support numerous types of data, be accessible over the internet, be controlled by the user, and be easy for developers to use. At Aspen, we’re building a platform that can do just that. We provide a service that hosts users’ databases that sync across their devices, handles authentication and authorization to keep data under the user’s control, and offers a developer kit to create apps designed for Aspen Databases that are easy to build and instantly scalable.
If you want to learn more, check out our website (www.aspen.cloud) or shoot me an email at matt@aspen.cloud.
