Why are Major Health Institutions Ditching Centralized Cloud Storage for Filecoin?
The decentralized cloud storage platform Filecoin continues to gain credibility with the scientific and medical communities.
In a surprising move, many scientific research labs and medical facilities are making the revolutionary switch to hosting their private research data on the secured decentralized peer-to-peer storage network for lower costs and data integrity.
Furthermore, institutes are favoring the decentralized solution as it provides enhanced routes to collaboration.
Let’s examine why some major health and research institutions are ditching centralized cloud storage facilities for Filecoin.
The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute Moves to Filecoin
An Australian medical organization with over 23 labs and 230 scientists recently announced that it switched its storage method to favor the peer-to-peer storage network Filecoin.
Inaugurated by Princes Diana, The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute is now officially using the Distributed Storage Solutions (DDS) storage provider on Filecoin to store over 137 terabytes of cardiac research data.
Todd Ryman, the institute’s IT Director, stated that the shift occurred in September 2022 to secure cost-effective storage while enhancing data integrity.
With its data research mounting, the institute needed a secure solution to storing its data without facing increased prices. For example, the institute’s SyncroPatch machine generates over 20,000 data points daily. As a result, the medical instrument produces terabytes of data every week, which needs to be stored and maintained.
The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute now joins a long list of institutes starting to switch to the P2P storage solution, including clients such as the University of California, the University of Utah, and UC Berkeley, which stores physics research.
Why are Research Institutions Moving to FIlecoin?
Filecoin is often considered a peer-to-peer version of Amazon S3, allowing users to store data on a decentralized storage solution.
One of the primary driving forces behind the switch to Filecoin data storage is that it’s cost-effective. For example, Ryman stated that the institute favored Filecoin over on-premises storage systems and cloud-based solutions because it offered cost savings.
In particular, Ryman stated that the institute would no longer be charged excessive fees from cloud providers for restoring data.
Furthermore, institutes are starting to favor decentralized solutions as they provide enhanced data integrity, making it a perfect fit for research and medical institutes.
The decentralized architecture behind Filecoin improves data redundancy and durability, reducing the risk of data loss by removing a single point of hardware failure.
Finally, another reason institutes favor the decentralized solution is that they can easily share their data with other researchers, a critical component required in medical science.
Instead of undergoing large-scale data transfers, institutes can provide their peers with access to specific datasets, enhancing collaboration and accelerating research outcomes while simultaneously maintaining the privacy and security of the datasets.
How Does FILLiquid Help in this Research Revolution?
Filliquid is proud to be a part of this research revolution as we seek to help ensure consistent storage power expansion for the Filecoin network.
We believe storage providers will eventually struggle to expand storage capacity as they have to pledge more $FIL for each new storage deal.
As $FIL storage mining rewards are delayed, it increases the financial burdens for storage providers as they have to either buy or borrow $FIL to continue their expansion.
Unfortunately, both options are unsustainable over the long term — especially if the price of $FIL continues to rise.
That’s why we created FILLiquid.
We provide a solution that allows storage providers to borrow $FIL without increasing their financial burden.
Our platform is a decentralized, open-source liquidity pool that creates a lending market by bridging $FIL holders (lenders) to storage providers (borrowers).
Instead of depositing crypto or fiat collateral to secure a loan, storage providers can pledge their beneficiary address to the smart contract to borrow $FIL for the sole purpose of expanding storage.
The beneficiary address contains all $FIL pledges in the node and future $FIL rewards from storage mining. Therefore, it can serve as sufficient collateral to protect lenders while letting storage providers expand their business without worrying about increased financial pressure.
We’re putting the final touches on our platform and will be ready to launch in Q1 2024. If you hold $FIL or provide storage services on Filecoin, follow our Discord to discover how you can participate in our upcoming Testnet.
