CESS, the best choice for decentralized cloud storage

The importance of data storage is undeniable. For businesses, regardless of the industry or stage they are in, from financial reports to customer information, from user data to business data, these are crucial and sensitive aspects. Companies need to store data in a secure and reliable space.

Advantages and Challenges of Centralized Cloud Storage

From traditional, cumbersome paper file storage systems to today's more flexible, efficient, and customizable digital solutions, storage technology has been advancing. As businesses grow, they find that the volume of data generated or processed internally, as well as accessed externally, continues to increase. The larger the data volume, the greater the complexity of storing, processing, analyzing, and retrieving that data. Centralized storage solutions allow users to store data over the internet and enable remote access anytime, anywhere.

Thus, it provides easy access across devices, quick mobility, and rapid deployment, as well as data processing functions such as backup, updates, and downloads. Of course, businesses need to pay for the storage services and space they enjoy. As storage costs continue to rise, entrepreneurs find that they also face the following challenges when using centralized cloud storage systems:

- Lack of Ownership and Control

With centralized storage systems, a company's data is stored on a central server managed by the host. The host can monitor, review, or even disclose any data to third parties. Naturally, companies lose the ability to control and customize their data storage settings. This lack of control and customization poses inconveniences for large enterprises with more complex data needs.

- Data Breaches and Security Risks

In recent years, almost all major industry players have been found to be involved in data breach incidents. Centralized cloud servers are always located in a single region. If a power failure occurs, the entire network may collapse, leading to the loss of unsaved data blocks.

- Increased Storage Costs

Centralized storage systems eliminate the need for companies to invest in servers and expensive data storage infrastructure. However, cloud service providers charge exorbitant prices for bandwidth transmission and data security. Additionally, the cost of hiring experts or migrating from one cloud provider to another has also become quite high. Many business owners complain that 30% of their total cloud computing budget is wasted.

- Low Transfer Speeds

Centralized servers are located in remote areas, far from users and businesses, and distance limitations can slow down transfer speeds.

Of course, we must acknowledge that the widespread adoption of centralized cloud storage has its inevitability and advancement in the context of past industry development stages. To this day, centralized cloud storage can meet the storage needs of billions of mainstream users and large enterprises, boasting high performance and low costs.

Advantages and Challenges of Decentralized Cloud Storage

Businesses around the world are seeking faster, more secure, and low-cost alternatives to meet their growing data storage needs, particularly in the Web3 industry, where the unique data characteristics and technical requirements make centralized cloud storage insufficient for their data needs.

Decentralized cloud storage serves as one of the important infrastructures of Web3, providing a more competitive and suitable alternative for Web3. As a builder and innovator in the decentralized cloud storage space, CESS explores and breaks through existing decentralized cloud storage technologies, addressing the need for high-frequency dynamic data online storage in Web3, and providing a decentralized full-stack solution for different groups such as large institutions, enterprise-level commercial applications, and individual users.

- Higher Security and Reliability

Unlike centralized cloud storage, which stores all files in a centralized system, decentralized cloud storage uses distributed storage, where security does not rely on any single server but on each individual server. This enhances reliability and redundancy in the event of a failure, making it an excellent way to store personal or enterprise data. CESS has made scientifically effective innovations in the architectural design of distributed storage, adopting a layered, coupled design approach, divided into blockchain service layer, distributed storage resource layer, distributed content delivery layer, and application layer. Through data slicing technology, it can achieve secure storage of massive amounts of data.

- No Centralized Control, Data Sovereignty Returns

The prevalence of data breaches and the scrutiny in traditional data storage reflect the issue of centralized control over data. Under the current state of centralized cloud storage, users do not control their data ownership, let alone the profits generated from their personal data. CESS employs MDRC (Multi-type Data Rights Confirmation Mechanism), which preprocesses data when users upload it, including processes such as digital fingerprint extraction --- fingerprint on-chain --- fingerprint comparison. The on-chain digital fingerprint serves as the unique proof of data ownership, and MDRC ensures data rights confirmation on the CESS network, returning data ownership to the data owners.

- Data Privacy Protection and Permission Management

Decentralized cloud storage mathematically guarantees the privacy and security of user data through cryptography, rather than relying on database network security. Selective encryption controlled by users is one of the basic rights for users to maintain data privacy. By addressing data ownership and privacy issues, data ownership is returned to users, allowing them to manage their own data privacy. CESS has pioneered the Multi-type Data Rights Confirmation Mechanism (MDRC), enabling users to truly possess data ownership through data tracing, data mapping, and data similarity algorithms.

Additionally, CESS has introduced DeOSS (Decentralized Object Storage Service), which serves as a decentralized, object-based massive storage service within the CESS network, aimed at providing fast read/write, high security, scalability, and privacy management for users with high-frequency dynamic data storage needs. DeOSS supports online real-time data sharing and ensures user data privacy through management and tiered privacy permissions, allowing users to decide whether to make their data public, private, or partially private.

Furthermore, CESS has innovatively introduced TEE (Trusted Execution Environment), ensuring that data processing occurs under the PoDR² (Proof of Recoverable Storage with Multiple Copies) mechanism, achieving encryption, storage proof, decryption, and other processes, thereby ensuring confidentiality and integrity to maintain data security and privacy.

Data Value Links to the Future

The centralized storage market has now entered a relatively mature development stage, while decentralized storage is still developing. After outlining the advantages of decentralized cloud storage, we find that its various benefits address the issues currently faced by centralized storage. However, it is undeniable that decentralized cloud storage also faces ongoing challenges in terms of continuous technological development and iteration, improvements in speed and scalability, and overcoming high entry and participation barriers.

Yet decentralized cloud storage still possesses unstoppable momentum for development. This is due to the return of data sovereignty to users and the foundation of data security and privacy, which promotes the formation of data value chains and the development of the digital economy era.

For users, the current centralized storage only fulfills the storage function, and users must pay for storage while their data security and control are not guaranteed. However, as the value of data continues to rise, data storage is gradually evolving into an industrial value chain, where users not only own data ownership but also possess data trading rights. CESS supports and facilitates the valorization and circulation of data, allowing users to change data ownership without revealing private keys or data content through proxy re-encryption technology, enabling every user to truly enjoy the value of their data.