The Decentralized Storage Alliance (DSA) revealed today that The Decentralized AI Society (DAIS), Akave, DeStor, Seal Storage, Curio and Titan Network, have all joined a consortium that is working toward making it easier to rely on peer-to-peer networking services to store and manage data.
Initially founded by AMD, Seagate, Ernst & Young, Protocol Labs and Filecoin Foundation (FF), the DSA has been defining reference architectures for implementing decentralized storage across multiple use cases. Additionally, the DSA is working on developing specifications for service level agreements (SLAs) and access controls (ACLs).
Daniel León, founding advisor of the DSA, said the overall goal is to build a community that in addition to helping to reduce the cost of data storage also ensures data is more secure.
Akave CEO Stefaan Vervaet added those efforts will prove crucial at a time when the number of use cases involving decentralized storage continue to expand. For example, organizations looking to operational artificial intelligence (AI) models need to be able to retain control over their data, versus becoming overly dependent on centralized storage services provided by a cloud service. Many of those cloud services simply wind up holding an organization’s data hostage as more applications are built and deployed, said Vervaet.
As concerns over the data provenance and privacy in the age of AI increase, the number of organizations that will need to rely on decentralized storage services such as the one provided by Akave will increase, he added.
More organizations will also leverage decentralized storage to create data marketplaces through which they make the data they create available as a commercial service. A decentralized storage network can be used to make that data available in a way that validates ownership in much the same way Bitcoins are processed and shared.
The one thing that is apparent is that as the amount of data being generated and consumed continues to exponentially increase, it is becoming less feasible to move that volume of data into the cloud. A decentralized approach to storing data, in contrast, provides a more economical alternative that makes use of peer-to-peer protocols to provide access to data wherever it resides in a distributed computing environment.
Decentralized storage is already at the core of many blockchain applications that drive so-called Web3 applications. As those use cases continue to expand, the number of organizations that will have confidence in decentralized storage services should increase.
In the meantime, IT teams will need to come to terms with data volumes that continue to exponentially increase. Data may be the new proverbial oil, but few organizations have the ability to process what can now easily become petabytes of data cost-effectively. Until that issue gets resolved, the ability to drive new applications that are dependent on the right data being made available at the right time will remain a significant challenge.
Arguably, relying on legacy approaches to centrally manage data that by definition needs to be widely distributed might not make as much sense as it did in what is rapidly becoming a previous era of computing.
