A couple of decades ago, if you wanted to store your organization’s data in a different location, it would have served as an overhead. Today with all the hype around cloud computing and the growing popularity of remote working, the concept of storing retrievable data has changed.
A 21st-century entrepreneur prioritizes a centralized system for data storage as opposed to local facilities.
However, that’s not enough. Recent advancements in technology have paved a way for a new system, AKA: decentralized data storage.
This has created a gap between what the data analysts should do and what they actually do. While some prefer to stick to the central system, others find decentralization to be a major asset.
It is too soon to lay a verdict on which is better, however, what we can do is study the two, outline the differences and suggest which would be the smarter way of storing data.
What is Centralized Data Storage?
Centralized data storage is where all of the data is stored in a single location, as chosen by the business. The primary reason why organizations adopted such a storage solution was the need to consolidate data and provide ease of access to all authorized users.
Even though the centralized data storage increases the speed and rate of data access, it has several limitations. The most common one being the increased latency while accessing data from remote locations, resulting in poor performance.
What this implies is that data is stored in a central location adjacent to the organization. For users accessing or seeking data from the cluster, the time lag would depend upon the distance from the server.
For instance, if someone in LA requests data from a data center located in New York, the time to download is longer. This is where the idea of decentralized storage comes into play.
What is Decentralized Storage?
Unlike the traditional idea of storing data in locations that are thousands miles away from most customers, decentralized data storage encompasses a revolutionary technology to distribute data across multiple locations, making it easier for users to access and retrieve.
These storage locations can be anything from geo-distributed centers to locations behind the corporate firewall. Tebi is one such solution built on the ZTNA network, enabling you to store your organization’s data more cleverly and efficiently.
Introducing a decentralized storage system has a lot of benefits, the key ones to note being:
1. Remote access to the network without needing to create a subset. With Centralized data servers, a subset of the storage space is created to save the organization data. This is not the case with decentralized data servers.
2. Considering that decentralized data storage has data stored in multiple locations across the globe, there is no single point of failure.
3. When you have your entire organizational data stored in a centralized cloud server, the privacy of the same can be easily compromised. A single breach in the server may result in the loss of that data. On the other hand, decentralized data servers hinder any such activity.
4. If at any point in time, the central server stops working, the data becomes inaccessible. However, with decentralized data servers, even if a whole data center stops operating, others will replace it and maintain the workflow.
5. Speed is one of the important factors when accessing data from servers. The centralized server, although a good alternative to local storage, fails to provide the same efficiency for users distributed across regions. With decentralized data centers, data is stored at multiple locations, or to be specific, geographically distributed centers. This makes the data accessible at multiple locations without slowing down the speed.
Conclusion
Whether you wish to store your organizational data in centralized servers or geo-distributed networks is a personal decision.
However, it is apparent from the comparison above that decentralized data storage is a better option when targeting users across different countries or even across multiple continents.
