Over the past few years, cloud storage has emerged in the tech industry as a panacea for data storage. You no longer need to maintain expensive hardware to accommodate software that consumes ever-increasing amounts of gigabytes. Today, you can store all of this ever-growing data in the cloud.
This sounds like getting rid of landfills altogether to solve the problem of environmental degradation. However, the reality is that data infrastructure is not the reason cloud storage has achieved such tremendous success.
The Dark History of Cloud Storage
The advantage of storing data locally is that it’s easier to preserve and protect data security. Once you put your data in the cloud, it becomes more vulnerable to hacker attacks, posing a risk of data breaches. To date, there has been a string of cloud storage data security incidents.
In 2010, Microsoft employee information was compromised by hackers, making Microsoft one of the first companies to suffer a cloud storage data breach.In 2012, more than 68 million user accounts at the personal cloud storage service Dropbox were compromised, and nearly 5 gigabytes of data were stolen. That same year, hackers breached the professional networking site LinkedIn, stealing 6 million user passwords and posting them on a Russian hacker forum.In May 2016, hackers once again stole and attempted to sell LinkedIn user account details worth approximately 167 million. In 2017, Apple’s iCloud was also hacked, resulting in the online leak of private photos belonging to several celebrities.
The impact of cloud storage security breaches is not limited to the online world; it can also have devastating consequences in the real world. In 2016, more than 93 million voter registration records from Mexico’s National Electoral Institute were leaked.Improper database configuration led to the public disclosure of confidential information. This incident posed an unprecedented potential threat to the nation’s democratic foundations. Furthermore, the company that holds the distinction of having suffered the largest cloud security breach in history is the tech giant Yahoo.After a three-year legal battle, Yahoo ultimately assumed full liability for all losses resulting from the data breach dating back to 2013. In this data theft incident, 1 billion user accounts were compromised, with the stolen data including private and confidential information such as names, email addresses, dates of birth, and answers to security questions.
An Unexpected Solution
Blockchain may be the best solution to the security issues surrounding brokers’ cloud storage. Blockchain is known for its crucial role in cryptocurrency systems such as Bitcoin. The significance of blockchain technology lies in its ability to ensure data security through cryptography.The entire concept behind blockchain is based on the principle of not relying on third parties; new “blocks” can only be added to the “chain” through cryptographic techniques. This underlying structure means that, over time, it becomes virtually impossible to hack. At the same time, its cryptographic system relies on distributed algorithms, allowing individual nodes to self-verify, transmit, and manage information, thereby ensuring a very high level of security.
However, this does not mean that blockchain is flawless, as it has also experienced security breaches in the past. But we believe that as blockchain technology continues to improve, these security threats will become increasingly minor.Another issue worth noting is that if you link cryptocurrency “tokens” to economic value, the value of these tokens may become unstable, and the cost of completing transactions may fluctuate significantly—prices may be very low when volatility is low, and extremely high when volatility is high.Furthermore, the data security token market has limited liquidity; when liquidity becomes very low, cryptocurrencies may not be suitable for use in large data centers.
Although every data security solution carries its own risks, the risks associated with cloud technology are undoubtedly more manageable and warrant continued development.
