Enterprise IPFS
Walled Gardens
Over the past 15 years, data storage providers have built massive walled gardens around their cloud services. As David Friend, the CEO of Wasabi, points out, “…Amazon and Microsoft are creating incompatible walled gardens around their cloud offerings — this is true at the technology level, with no industry-wide independent standards across cloud providers, as well as at the business model level.” Organizations have realized they are locked into a rigid, siloed world where storing their data in one “cloud” or another reduces control and multiplies costs. This is in direct opposition to an open world where interoperating across storage providers reduces vendor lock-in dependencies, avoids downtime, and allows organizations to leverage unique services across various providers. However, we haven’t had an efficient way to do this. Organizational data has not been portable.
Data Portability
Data portability is a term often associated with end-users. According to Wikipedia, “Data portability is a concept to protect users from having their data stored in “silos” or “walled gardens” that are incompatible with one another, i.e. closed platforms, thus subjecting them to vendor lock-in. Data portability requires common technical standards to facilitate the transfer from one data controller to another, thus promoting interoperability.”
It’s a great idea and one commonly talked about in the Web 3 ecosystem. But, data portability shouldn’t be thought of as something only for end-users. Organizations, from startups to enterprises, should also be able to easily port their data across providers and have interoperability.
IPFS is WeWork for Data Storage
An ideal world where an organization could move and store data across any cloud provider, including on-premise options, doesn’t happen with a snap of the finger. Like the definition of data portability points out, you need a standard, a protocol. Enter IPFS. As mentioned in my previous post, “The IPFS Network,” IPFS allows you to easily store and move data, regardless of the cloud provider or underlying device facilitating it. This allows organizations to store data in a way that abstracts the providers themselves.
“..it should be as easy to change data storage providers as it is to change CDN providers.”
In the context of today, it should be as easy to change data storage providers as it is to change CDN providers. Data storage should be something easily swappable with low frictions so you can optimize for your needs as an organization in regards to cost or performance. Put another way, IPFS will make data storage as easy and flexible as WeWork makes office space. This is because IPFS allows low switching costs and a diversity of available options.
“IPFS will make data storage as easy and flexible as WeWork makes office space…”
Doing so will enable organizations to start storing and moving data in ways they’ve previously not been able to. This will open up new business models and efficiencies for the end users, including the push for a universal digital identity. So, what will this IPFS world look like?
Organizational Data Control through IPFS
The above graphic shows an instance of an organization storing their data on IPFS with their own on-premise servers. From a control perspective, this gives an organization the maximum amount of control over their data by owning the data and where it is stored. With IPFS, an organization can:
- Store data with on-premise servers
- Efficiently leverage on-premise desktop hardware for additional storage
- Connect storage availability across multiple locations within an organization
However, much like the reason we went to the cloud in the first place, on-premise storage can be expensive and difficult to scale. How do we leverage the cloud with IPFS?
The above graphic depicts an organization with an instance of on-premise data storage while also using Cloud A provider for data storage. With IPFS’s data portability, the organization would be able to easily replicate it’s on-premise data to the Cloud A provider to benefit from their infrastructure while still maintaining control of it’s data. Additionally, IPFS allows an organization to leverage Cloud A’s data center locations to:
- Blend the provider’s storage costs with your own depending on needs
- Optimize content delivery to customers by being physically closer
- Reduce risk of service interruption through diversification
Going a step further, what if Cloud A isn’t providing the necessary performance or cost advantages the organization needed?
Again, because of IPFS’s ability to lower switching costs and provide control of data to the organization that owns it, you can easily switch to another provider. The above graphic depicts an organization using on-premise, Cloud B, and Cloud C as providers for data storage. This would have the ability to be used as a true hybrid cloud setup. Similar to the example with Cloud A, the organization would be able to easily replicate it’s on-premise data to the other providers to benefit from:
- Blending storage costs across providers with your own costs depending on needs
- Optimizing content delivery to customers by using the provider’s data center locations to be physically closer to the end-point
- Reduce risk of service interruption through diversification across providers
Now, to this point, all of the examples have assumed on-premise data storage. That is a stretched assumption on my part for many. So, what are the advantages of IPFS if we were to run only in the cloud like many organizations do?
Well, it would feel exactly the same. But, instead of controlling your data from an on-premise position, you would control the data through the cloud providers. Now, technically, this does reduce some control because of the dependency risk introduced by relying solely on the providers. However, you are still able to control your exposure to dependency risk by distributing across the providers. In the above graphic, we see IPFS being used in an all-cloud architecture to facilitate a multi or hybrid cloud setup where multiple providers are storing and moving data for an organization. Utilizing this IPFS setup, organizations would be able to easily leverage the various advantages of multiple clouds while maintaining data portability.
Why Organizations Will Adopt IPFS
To summarize, the flexibility IPFS provides an organization is an incredible paradigm shift from our siloed cloud of today. Organizations will adopt IPFS because of the low switching costs, interoperability across storage providers, and ability to mix and match features of cloud storage providers. This flexibility will create efficiencies and business models that have been previously impossible because of the overhead costs of today’s walled garden cloud. Because of this, I can’t wait to see where IPFS will take us.
If you are interested in more conversations around this subject, feel free to join the Pinata slack or reach out to me on twitter @kyletut.
