Virtually everything on the internet—applications, websites, SaaS—requires data storage, computational resources, and, more often than not, content delivery networks (CDNs). There was a time when all these resources had to be sustained by individual internet companies/operations. This significantly increased the entry barrier for startups as before any application or website had to be launched, the initiators had to acquire necessary hardware requirements; all excess purchases had led to unnecessary spending and any insufficient spending had led to missed growth opportunities during times of usage surge.

The sudden and swift rise of cloud computing made the dilemmas described above a problem of the past. While cloud computing has been a boon for the growth of the internet, it has made the web incredibly centralized as the vast portion of cloud computing services are controlled by a handful of companies.

Cloud Computing: Dangerously Centralized

The sentence that you’re reading right now is delivered to you through the usage of cloud service providers. This demonstrates how important cloud networks have become to the internet. The problem with this is that if a single cloud provider suffers an attack, major sections of the internet suffer the attack.

In 2017, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is Amazon’s cloud computing division, went offline and, with it, more than 150,000 websites and applications, including major platforms like Reddit and FourSquare, became inaccessible. The consequences of this event highlight the problems associated with a centralized backbone for the entire web.

A handful of companies keep the internet online.

Operators of websites, applications, and even enterprise software utilize cloud computing services because this offers an easy means to outsource computational hardware management and maintenance. Perhaps even more importantly, it offers the advantage of instant scalability as most cloud services are billed on usage; this removes the possibility of excess spending while also removing the possibility of lacking sufficient resources to sustain a traffic surge.

Cloud computing is incredibly important, but its centralized state makes it a necessary evil—things needn’t be this way.

Cloud computing came to exist on the mere basis that a few large tech giants, particularly Amazon, possess massive amounts of computational resources that are often in excess of the true demand. In fact, selling these excess resources on a per-use basis has become Amazon’s key source of profit and the means to finance its other ventures.

Problems with the Status Quo

Centralized computational infrastructure is dangerous.

The growing value of assets—even data—on the internet makes the bounty of breaching networks more desirable day by day. The Equifax hack is one of the most dangerous reminders of how centralized control of data can lead to severely damaging outcomes in the evident of a hack. Yet, cloud service providers not only provide centralized data storage, but also centralized computational resources and content delivery to the entire net.

As the world is becoming increasingly digitalized, it is of paramount importance that the backbone of the web becomes decentralized.

A Decentralized Cloud

Creating a decentralized cloud is an ambitious task, but not an impossible one. Internet and smart device penetration has reached the farthest points of the world and a vast portion of the world’s population possesses unused data storage capacity and computational resources.

A new blockchain project called NOIA Network aims to aggregate these resources and make them available to both independent and institutional developers so that cloud service demands can be fulfilled without reliance on centralized entities. NOIA Network is the most advanced materialization of a decentralized content delivery platform. Through the use of blockchain technology, the distribution remains secure; the ease of adding resources to the network maintains scalability while ensuring anyone across the world can play a role in keeping the web online.

To top if off, in order to take advantages of even more aspects of blockchain technology, NOIA has created protocols that execute a programmable internet. In short, this ensures that the internet consumes the most efficient amount of resources from the most effective source of resources.

While such a development is incredibly important even today, it will pay a critical role in the creation of the smart cities of tomorrow. If autonomous devices are to truly play a driving role in all industries, it is imperative that the networks they run on are not susceptible to failure if a single centralized entity can be breached. With a decentralized cloud, autonomous devices can securely operate the most important tasks in the economy without the lingering concern of inevitable system collapse.

On a closing note, it’s worth mentioning that NOIA’s delivery of a decentralized internet backbone is already facing demand. While most blockchain projects are listed on exchanges even though the underlying product is nowhere in sight, NOIA is one of the very few developments that has an exponentially growing demand even before its token becomes tradable on public digital asset exchanges.