- The most important concern of all business leaders across the globe is information security.
- For on-promising data, all different types of businesses must encounter various issues.
Compared to all the traditional centralized storage, there are many servers operated by a single entity or company. All the data files, which are geographically distributed nodes and are connected via peer-to-peer networking, are the work of the decentralized storage systems.
What Is Decentralized File Storage?
Decentralized file storage is sometimes but not always a blockchain. As mentioned above, decentralized file storage ultimately involves storing data among various computers or nodes connected to the P2P network, such as InterPlanetary or BitTorrent.
Later, all the data are uploaded into a decentralized storage system, split into very small pieces, and then sent to the various nodes in the network for storage. After some time, if one needs to retrieve the data file, the network will eventually piece together the sharded components from the individual nodes storing it and later reassemble them for people to download the same.
All the nodes in a decentralized storage system eventually can’t view or alter files because a cryptographic mechanism encrypts all data automatically stored on the network. The users must always use private keys to access their data, along with preventing some unauthorized entities from retrieving the information.
Decentralized File Storage- Pros and Cons
Talking about the benefit of decentralized file storage, the first benefit can always be political. Also, it is designed in such a way that it is apolitical. All the different files stored on a decentralized file service are very resistant to some decisions of the centralized authority.
The decentralized file storage is also preventing a private company from enforcing its politics with the help of refusing service or taking some other action on the files it eventually holds. If someone is using decentralized file storage, then they need to make sure that no single authority can prevent some kind of files, even if they are illegal material, and they should always be aware of the same.
Also, all the various kinds of data stored on these networks are encrypted just before being stored on the network and there is no single computer that holds enough chunks of the whole file to piece together the puzzle along with deducing what the file contains.
If anything has benefits, there will also be some limitations attached to it. The decentralized storage system always relies on the network of nodes to store and retrieve the data, one needs to ensure that the access time can always be slower than in centralized storage systems.
Also, there is a lack of standardization in decentralized storage as there are different protocols that may use different encryption methods.
Conclusion
From the above content piece, it is clear that decentralized storage is still an emerging technology that has yet to gain a lot of adoption. After some time, all the users will seek a more efficient, affordable, secure data storage mechanism that can always be popularized.
