Migrating your data to a cloud platform offers many benefits for a business. Besides offering the ability to access your data from anywhere with an internet connection, it also offers enhanced security, cost-efficiency, convenience, enhanced potential for automation, and easier scalability and disaster recovery.
However, traditional cloud storage still requires something from the user that seems to be a tough ask these days—trust.
If an organization is to migrate some or all of its highly valuable company data to an offsite cloud server, it stands to reason that the user should want to trust the owner of the cloud server. Of course! But truly being trustworthy in the modern era has proven tricky, and for many different reasons, businesses and other users of cloud storage may now be thinking twice about which cloud service or provider they’ll use.
But What if You Didn’t Have to Trust Anyone?
Blockchain-secured cloud storage can provide a new layer of reliable data security
Originally, blockchain was developed as the foundational technology for Bitcoin (and later all cryptocurrencies). Now, those same technological features of blockchain—ledgers and public/private key encryptions—are making blockchain-powered cloud storage (also known as “distributed cloud storage”) possible. Data security becomes a shared responsibility between the owner of the data and the owner of the cloud server when data is uploaded to a traditional cloud server. However, the decentralization of data that happens with blockchain-powered cloud storage ensures there are no central servers to be compromised—and no single server owner to trust.
However, by breaking up files across a collection of encrypted nodes—instead of a single server—the responsibility for that data gets fully offloaded to the technology and math of blockchain-native decentralization and encryption. No moremiddleman/cloud server owner—and for good reason! When you have a decentralized, immutable ledger (a hallmark feature of blockchain technology), there’s no need to trust a cloud services provider.
Ledgers are independently verifiable, too. You can use the blockchain ledger to verify that data you backed up and stored in the cloud with third-party vendors has gone completely unchanged even weeks, months, or years later.
You can check file signatures across all the ledgers on all the nodes in the network and verify that they haven’t been changed. If someone does change a record, then the signature is rendered invalid.
Blockchain is virtually impossible to hack. While hackers can break into traditional networks and find all the data in a single repository and exfiltrate it or corrupt it, the blockchain makes this unfeasibly hard. The data is decentralized, encrypted, and cross-checked by the whole network. Once a record is on the ledger it’s almost impossible to alter or remove without it being noticed and invalidating the signature.
Every legitimate transaction is confirmed by multiple nodes on the network. To successfully hack blockchain, you would have to hack most of the nodes simultaneously, which, though technically possible with enough supercomputing power and time, is well beyond the ability of cybercriminals today.
And that’s how blockchain-secured cloud storage with Imaging Office Systems works!
Benefits of Blockchain-Secured Cloud Storage
- Comprehensive Decentralization and Redundancy: Using blockchain, your data is stored in multiple nodes intelligently disbursed across the globe. This means you data isn’t physically located in a single place. It’s stored in fractional, encrypted packets across multiple locations.
- Enhanced Security: The distributed nature of blockchain means it is almost impossible to hack. This reduces risks of data insecurity and fraud while building the “trustworthiness” of blockchain-secured cloud storage.
- Fewer “Transactional Middlemen”: Blockchain reduces reliance on third parties like banks, brokers, and internet service providers by offering true peer-to-peer networking that makes such intermediary roles unnecessary.
- Full Network Transparency: Blockchain transactions, which uploading and downloading data would become in blockchain-powered cloud storage, leave an unalterable “paper trail” that is viewable by all participants.
- Potential for Automation: The programmability of blockchain makes it possible to automatically trigger actions or events once specified conditions are met. This capability opens the door for many kinds of use cases, including the use of smart contracts.
- Faster Processes: Blockchain can speed up process execution in multi-party scenarios—and allow faster transactions that aren’t limited by office hours.