3.6 Million Websites Went Offline Due to a Fire: How Decentralized Cloud Would've Prevented It

Cloud Storage providers have always been at the center of controversy but for reasons that could’ve been prevented otherwise. May it be the Dropbox breach, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, or the iCloud hack of 2017, the centralized cloud has never been a safe custodian of your private data but we may have finally found the perfect solution - Decentralized Cloud Storage.

On Wednesday, 10th March 2021, a tragedy struck OVHcloud - the largest hosting provider in Europe and third largest in the world based on physical servers when a fire broke out in a room at the SBG-2 OVHcloud data center in Strasbourg, France.

It is reported that the fire destroyed SBG-2 and damaged four of 12 rooms in the adjacent SBG-1 data center. Two adjacent data centers, SBG-3 and SBG-4, were not damaged but shut down as a precautionary measure, which resulted in a time-consuming reboot of all their systems.

The cause of the fire is still unknown but the incident caused nearly 3.6 million websites to go offline including a website for the French government and cryptocurrency exchange.

This is a grim reminder that a centralized cloud isn’t safe from hardware failures in addition to security breaches and privacy concerns. A centralized cloud stores the data in one server so it becomes a single point of failure where if the server goes down then the entire network fails and you won’t be able to access your cloud data until the server is working again. Even if the server is working perfectly fine, there are unethical practices such as manipulating a user’s data for profit and outrageous costs to worry about.

It has been a long time coming but we finally have a solution to all of these problems. In decentralized cloud storage service such as StorX, the data is split into encrypted fragments and stored across multiple storage nodes worldwide.

It is a simple concept but the idea of having a decentralized server means that even if multiple storage nodes go down, the user can still recover the entire data. As for privacy and security concerns, it is open-source and uses blockchain technology so the user has sole-ownership of the data. While comparing a decentralized cloud with a centralized cloud, it is 100% anonymous, faster, more secure, and offers the highest uptime at a fraction of the cost.

This simple concept would’ve prevented such a massive incident and potentially saved millions of dollars for the company. It is a lesson to remember for all that the future lies in a decentralized internet.