One Data per World
Sep 10, 2014
“Let him who has never been limited by disk space be the first to throw a stone at her.”
Companies, like individuals, are using less and less their personal computers or servers to store their data. The vast majority of worldwide files and data are stored in the cloud (Google Drive, Microsoft Enterprise Storage, Hubic, iCloud, Dropbox…).
These solutions offer expandable or unlimited storage solutions.
But limitless does not exist. Like any resource, global resources in disk space are limited, even in the cloud. Storage requirements are exploding exponentially.
But how to stop or at least slow down this growing need?
To begin with, it is clear that the management of our data planet is not all optimized.
Let’s see an example :
- Alice publishes on her personal blog, hosted by OVH, a picture that will, for sure, create a buzz.
- Bob downloads the picture and sends it by email to Carol.
- Carol immediately shares the photo on Facebook.
The same data, in a short delay, is stored three times: once on OVH, once on Google Drive and once on Facebook. And, as this photo creates the buzz, it is again copied, shared, and sent by thousands of other people…
However, there would be a way to significantly reduce this file storage’s cost: these 3 hosting solutions above could share this resource and the picture would be physically stored only once. The applications and systems using this file would only use references to that file.
The universal data storage can only work if it is led by an honest and independent organization.
But how can we trust such a system?
How to encourage the world to pool data?