What if Blockchain integrated with Cloud Computing?
By Rakesh Kumar on The Capital
In the 1990s, AT&T has launched the first web-based storage service for personal and business communication. Since then, there has been a lot of cloud storage services provides by Apple (iCloud), Google (Google Drive), Amazon (Amazon Web Services), Dropbox, etc. The public cloud service market is expected to reach 624 billion USD by 2023, and 94% of enterprises already use a cloud service. On the other hand, Blockchain market size will reach 7.6 billion USD by 2024 at a CAGR of 37.4%. The future believed figures of both these technologies are quite astonishing.
Geoff Hodge, chairman of the Milestone Group said that,
“With much of the industry focused on the promise of distributed ledger and blockchain technologies, cloud technologies have delivered a greater economic value across the investment businesses in 2019 in terms of improved operating leverage and efficiency. The development has opened up a new wave of hybrid operating models and taken outsourcing options to the next level, allowing investment firms to focus on core activities.”
Blockchain Technology
Blockchain Technology is a sort of distributed architecture that makes use of cryptographically signed transactions (ledger) of digital data. It works on decentralized system in a peer-to-peer (P2P) model and uses hashes to encrypt the data in the blocks. It started its journey of influence from the financial technology domain and has now spread its wings to a large number of sectors, including the likes of supply chain and distribution, logistics, healthcare industry, medical components, agriculture, retail, and so forth.
Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing services strive on resource pooling and virtualization techniques over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. It has revolutionized the way companies cutting across the industries, use their IT infrastructure, and deal with their computing requirements. With IT being the backbone of almost every organization, cloud computing is playing an important role in the transformation of the economic environment.
Integration of Blockchain in cloud computing
Both of these two technologies are changing the way the corporate world conducts business, and while these are impacting global trade, these are themselves going through a radical transformation. Cloud computing and blockchain technology can open up a world of opportunities if utilized in conjunction. While cloud computing can provide shared access to the IT infrastructure, blockchain technology can reduce the load and vulnerability related to the central databases and repositories. It is very much possible in the future that cloud computing will head towards decentralized architecture powered by the blockchain technology as the technology and innovations in the blockchain space continue to grow.
There are two ways available for integrating blockchain in cloud systems:
a) To facilitate enterprise networks like storage, replication and access to transactional databases.
b) Integrate with the security concepts between the task, user, and data management in clouds.
The following are the challenges and requirements for cloud-based blockchain transactions.
a) Security point of view: From user, the data are hidden and stored in data centres. Thus, the transactional activities should be assigned with tuning purposes. It means the cloud service allows its customers to possess control over the locations during which their data is stored and processed.
b) System resilience and fault tolerance: The system should be capable of finding an alternate node if any node fails in the network. So, a node replication mechanism in data centres and the use of multiple software applications.
c) Security towards blockchain improvements: Software should centrally assign in a distributed cloud environment and thus the utilization of multiple software applications.
Conclusion
Both these technologies have contributed enormously to the evolution of business scenarios across the world . Given the fact that operating principles of cloud computing and blockchain are starkly different (former relies on centralized repository while the latter is based on the principle of decentralization), it is natural to pit these technologies against each other. However, there are common grounds on which the working of both these technologies can be anchored and if researchers become successful in preparing a common minimum agenda for the future development (involving shared infrastructure of cloud computing and decentralized data sharing of blockchain), the whole world can be immensely benefited from the marriage of these two innovations.
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