What Will the Future of Data Storage Look Like?

The advent of the Internet forever changed the way we share and store data. The growth of the adoption of digitization was accelerated with the Web 2.0 revolution that brought us optimized search engines, widely-used social networks, mobile applications and cloud computing.

It made our lives easier in many ways but some issues remained unsolved or even magnified with the growing amount of shared data: constant data leakage reports, accelerating concentration of power in the hands of big tech companies and governments, ethical concerns over data usage has served as a foundation for the next revolution in data distribution called Web 3.0. How will we protect our data in future and what trends are already in place?

Let’s take 3 main issues of today’s Web services – centralized power, lack of security and transparency, as well as copyright issues – and see how cutting-edge data storage projects provide solutions by using as an example The Cumulus Encrypted Storage System (CESS)

Trend 1: Giving back data to its true owners – people

Cutting off the big tech companies from the data pipeline has been long called for. The future of the Internet does not assume endless middlemen profiting from every user data with shady consent forms that assume selling the information to third parties. Web 3.0 is a concept where distributed users and computers can interact via peer-to-peer networks without a need for a middleman.

Indeed, the majority of concerns with today’s giant data service providers are solved by decentralization. While centralization awards power to the tech corporations that orchestrate the social media and Web services, decentralization shifts power back to the data’s true owners – users. With the advent of blockchain, the internet and surrounding platforms have all chances to become truly human-centric.

The Cumulus Encrypted Storage System (CESS) is an ongoing blockchain-based data storage project with the mission to create a new global decentralized cloud data storage network for next-generation Web services (aka Web 3.0). Contrary to centralized solutions, where the CEOs and board of directors have the most power, in a peer-to-peer blockchain network, miners (network participants) play a crucial role. CESS proposes an innovative Random Rotational Selection (R²S) consensus mechanism to achieve low gas fees and rapid transaction processing throughput (10,000TPS), and to provide a fair, transparent, equal opportunity data sharing market to all participants, not manipulated by giant nodes.

Trend 2: Security and transparency as two sides of the same coin

Apart from centralization, one of the key issues of the current data storage systems is the lack of security and transparency. The biggest data breaches involve such prominent Web services providers as Yahoo with 3 billion accounts exposed, Alibaba with 1.1 billion pieces of data leaked, and professional network LinkedIn with 700 million users’ data violated. Sometimes, transparency issues led to the violation of privacy rights with data that users did not even know was collected like in the scandal with Cambridge Analytics and Facebook.

Avantgarde cryptographic technologies help to solve both issues. For example, Bitcoin protocol is shared as an open-source code, so everyone knows the rules of the game and the way their assets and data is protected. CESS also has implemented multiple mechanisms and proof schemes, including Proof of Data Reduplication and Recovery (PoDR²), to ensure data integrity and privacy. The client data is re-duplicated, encrypted, sliced, and finally distributed to store on multiple network nodes (computers).

In case for some reason, a network node is maliciously attacked and certain pieces of data are exposed, there will not be any serious damage since the data is encrypted and is only a small part of a data file. In the meantime, CESS uses multiple proof schemes to periodically verify that the storage nodes in the network actually store and keep the real data for clients as promised. If a storage node fails the verifications, it will be punished and the data recovery process will start repairing the missing data pieces by copying over from other network nodes holding the same data.

Trend 3: Solving copyright issues to create a fair market

Copyright issues are another problem of Web 2.0. There are many reasons for piracy to exist: from the unwillingness to pay a big price to censorship that cuts peoples’ ability to freely share content. But all those reasons come back to the root cause that has already been discussed above – centralization. For example, in decentralized networks, a government cannot control the data flows, hence censorship is impossible.

Also, decentralization makes middlemen obsolete that evidently results in cutting the costs for content for end-users. In the era of streaming, according to the Citigroup report on the music industry, artists take home about 12% of the revenues. No wonder, so many creators are choosing to use NFT (non-fungible tokens as a more fair alternative to the centralized markets.

NFT platforms have attracted significant enthusiasm from artists, auction houses, art collectors, celebrities, as well as strategic investors and societal elites who wish to capture the upside of the novel investment vehicle and/or hedge against inflation. Decentralized and secured storage of NFT provenance and trading data underpins consumer confidence on the respective NFT trading platform and NFTs traded on the platform. NFT examples are many and include literary works, paintings, music, videos, photos, and more.

For example, creators can upload and store NFT data on the CESS storage network as unique tokens; CESS will confirm data rights for the initial submission by the creators, achieving NFT data asset protection. Meanwhile, the copyright confirmation and transfer will be executed transparently and remain permanently trackable, as intrinsically guaranteed by CESS blockchain and smart contract technology. The protected tokens encourage a fan-based economy to share, trade, circulate and own NFT assets on the decentralized cloud data network. The community involved will generate a token economy, driving a new business model on CESS.

All this became possible with solid underlying technologies that guard the rights of both creators and their audience. For that, CESS has designed a unique Multi-format Data Rights Confirmation Mechanism (MDRC), which extracts data fingerprints from each data file to generate data certificate ID. By comparing similarities between data fingerprints, the system identifies data lineages of data files and may take appropriate actions to prevent possible copyright violations and to provide strong evidence for owners’ data rights protection. Also, the client data is pre-processed via AI algorithms to validate and confirm the owner’s data rights and to prevent possible copyright violations.

Summary

All on one, all three biggest pains of Web 2.0 services can be solved by applying cutting edge technologies. Decentralized cloud data storage is a key component of future Web 3.0 applications. This is proven by our example, CESS that by using the combination of AI and blockchain, exceeded in paving the path to the future of data storage – it decentralizes the data storage with a new consensus algorithm that ensures that power stays with network participants; it ensures data security and integrity with new protocol and encryptions; and applies a special data rights confirmation mechanism to prevent copyright violations.

Everyone is welcome to participate in the CESS network by contributing data storage resources, computational resources, or network bandwidth. Based on start-of-art virtualization, blockchain and cloud computing technologies, CESS organizes and manages the network resources providing clients with secure, high performance, and boundless cloud data storage services.

The CESS network’s roadmap shows that the project aims to continue its persevering efforts as part of the powerful driving force for the development of Web 3.0: the test mining of the decentralized cloud storage system will be conducted on September 8, and the decentralized storage system will be officially launched in October. CESS encourages members of the global community with excess or under-utilized resources to join CESS’s expandable network via the token economy incentive method. Decentralize your journey with CESS to Web3.0 and join innovators on Twitter and Telegram.