Blockchain Based Cloud Computing
This Article revolves around integration of Cloud Computing with Blockchain. So if you haven’t read my previous article on Security in Cloud Computing , have a look at it & come back to learn some more!!
Blockchain is the technology that allows all members to keep a ledger containing all transaction data and to update their ledgers to maintain integrity when there is a new transaction. Since the advancement of the Internet and encryption technology has made it possible for all members to verify the reliability of a transaction, the single point of failure arising from the reliability on an authorized third party has been solved. Blockchain Technology is the future of the industries striving for security and privacy improvements. It is a distributed ledger that records tamper-evident data in the form of a chain without any central authority. The participants or the devices in blockchain technology are called nodes. Blockchain provides a decentralized network in which all the network nodes have active participation to validate and verify the data.
INTEGRATION OF BLOCKCHAIN WITH CLOUD COMPUTING
Incorporating blockchain with cloud computing will bring us to the next era of data security and service availability.. Blockchain overcomes most of the research issues of the cloud with its following listed characteristics.
INTEROPERABILITY
In public clouds, internal communication is not allowed, and it makes many industries back off from using the cloud. When cloud integrated with blockchain, consider the different clouds as nodes. Inter-node communication is possible in the blockchain. All the nodes present in the same network share the data among themselves so that every node contains a copy of transactions. It brings transparency into the network. They update every next transaction into the ledger, which gets published to all other nodes. In this way, companies can add any number of networks and can preserve the accessibility of the data, which will thereby bring authenticity into the network.
CLOUD DATA MANAGEMENT
The data is stored in the cloud in a quite unstructured manner, while in the blockchain it is very structured. The data can be traced using the hash key generated for every block. Each block contains the previous block’s hash key, and it’s key to keep track of the network. The data in the block is validated and can be accessed by the nodes present in the net work. Cloud supports elasticity and can handle the fluctuations in computational loads as and when required. Using a Distributed ledger, this can be easily handled by managing a large number of events that cause a variety of smart contracts, ensuring service quality. Blockchain also ensures the user’s anonymity, and the user’s record can be safely removed from the system to prevent third party access to the user’s information. The integration of the cloud with blockchain will also ensure that many businesses have confidence in their security architecture, and it would become an on-demand service.
DATA ENCRYPTION
Since we all know, the data is decrypted before storing it in the cloud, which questions the data integrity. In the block chain network, all the block data is turned into a hash code using cryptographic algorithms, and it generates a hash key for each block. To ensure timeliness and permanent data integrity, the control system that collects data from the task scheduling produces hash code and records it in the blockchain network immediately .Because the blockchain has the facility for block discovery consensus mechanisms, block data integrity is maintained .Each node in the network contains a copy of each transaction that provides us with the availability and persistence that helps the network withstand potential fault points and attacks .While cloud-collected data is reliable, the blockchain nodes maximize data availability and data validity by projecting it as an on-demand service with no downtime.
In the Figure above, I have shown the architecture of the integration of cloud computing with blockchain technology. The user interacts with the server with the help of the application layer. Suppose, when a user requests a transaction through the application layer, the transactions’ details are stored by creating a block for each transaction. To add the block into the blockchain network, the blockchain network’s data would be verified by blockchain network validating nodes. The validation will be done based on consensus. Once the block is considered legitimate, all other network nodes would be connected to the network and data sent. All blockchain data is stored in blockchain protection cloud storage. Blockchain incorporation of the cloud provides data protection and also provides transparency.
Many Blockchain-Cloud applications can be applied in our daily activities, making our data more safe and secure. Various industries can use the services of Blockchain-Cloud. This integration can provide us with more storage flexibility, and at the same time, it keeps the data validated . Authorization to the network will be monitored, and also it increases the network resilience.
Conclusion
Cloud computing is a well-known technology as it has existed for many years. But people are still struggling to overcome some challenges of cloud computing like data security, data management, interoperability, etc. Blockchain technology is an emerging technology well known for its security and authenticity, which are the main characteristics that are making the world turn to its side. By integrating blockchain with cloud computing, there will be many advantages in usability, trust, security, scalability, data management, and many more advantages.
That is all folks. Hope you found it informative :). I will be back with more articles soon. Till then…
