Perlin Adoption Prospect

“Perlin Network is a practical, trustless and decentralized cloud computing marketplace”

It leverages underutilized compute power in everyday smart-devices to make supercomputing economically viable and accessible globally.

What is Cloud computing and growth prospects:

Cloud computing is the practice of sharing a network of servers which are hosted on the internet to store, process, share, and manage data rather than on a local server or a personal computer.

It specifically refers to a common storage space through which all the devices in the network can access data simultaneously.

The use of cloud computing technology not only provides cost benefits but also makes data accessible to all devices in the network at any time and from any location.

Cloud computing growth prospects:

Global cloud computing market share was valued at $260 billion in 2017 and is expected to reach up to $411 billion in 2020, growing at a CAGR of ~20% during the forecast period 2018‐2020.

Factors driving growth in cloud computing:

• The most important factor, which is driving the market, is the cost-effectiveness. Key problems faced today by many startups & small to medium scale enterprises is the lack of computing power at the lower cost. With the deployment of cloud computing services, organizations can save more than 35% of the annual operating costs.
• Another reason is agility. Due to varying organization needs and bureaucracy (e.g. too many approvals and reliance on hard-to-deploy physical servers), IT was often slow to respond. Cloud computing gives organizations the ability to easily expand or reduce computing needs to meet fluctuating demands.

“Like any new technology, the adoption of cloud computing is not free from issues”.

Challenges faced today by organizations:

1| Privacy and Security: The main challenge to cloud computing is how it addresses the security and privacy concerns of businesses thinking of adopting it. The fact that the valuable enterprise data will reside outside the corporate firewall raises serious concerns. Hacking and various attacks to cloud infrastructure would affect multiple clients.

Some infamous cloud security breaches:

– LinkedIn lost 167 Million account credentials in data breach. A Russian hacker, who goes by name “Peace,” sold 117 million email and password combinations on a dark web marketplace.
– Hackers breaking into celebrities personal Apple accounts and leaking private images on the web.

2| Platform lock-in: Businesses should have the leverage of migrating in & out and switching providers whenever they want. Today customers are dependent (i.e. locked-in) on a single cloud provider and cannot easily move in the future to a different vendor without substantial costs, legal constraints, or technical incompatibilities.

According to a Logicworks survey by Wakefield Research,
78% of IT decision makers believe that concerns about vendor lock-in prevent their organisation from maximising the benefits of cloud resources.

3| Integration: We now have more operating systems being used than ever before, including 5 or 6 versions of Windows, Linux, Apple OS, Android and so on. To add to this headache there are thousands of applications across these operating systems that need to be compatible.

Getting a particular cloud platform to integrate with so many different systems and programs is a tall order for the enterprise, creating obstacles to successfully adopt and deploy cloud-based solutions.

4| Reliability & Outage:Issues with downtime and unexpected outages occur in cloud computing due to various factors at vendor side like power failure, data center offline etc. 

Even the biggest cloud companies have seen their best-laid plans go to waste as their services go dark for hours at a time.

Some recent cases of cloud outages:
– Hundreds of enterprise services hit by Amazon AWS Outage, Mar 3, 2018.
– Azure outage: Microsoft working to restore key services after US regional disruption, Sept 5, 2018.
– Apple’s iCloud services suffered an extended outage, Oct 23, 2018.

5| Performance Bandwidth: Cloud computing solution can be a low cost for smaller applications but can be significantly high for the data-intensive applications.

Delivering intensive and complex data over the network requires much high bandwidth. Because of this, many businesses are waiting for a reduced cost and improved performance before switching to the cloud.

Why businesses should consider Perlin as an alternative:

High performance, less latency & cost-efficient: 
Perlin is developing ‘Wavelet’, a directed-acyclic-graph (DAG) using Avalanche consensus protocol with a novel implementation of proof-of-stake to produce a ledger that is metastable, Sybil-resistant, truly decentralized and fast.

It will enable Perlin network to reach performance levels comparable to competitors cloud-based platforms like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.

As per the latest test-net results (Detail report here),

– Perlin network (pre-alpha)reached 10,000 TPS.
– The average consensus latency is from 4.4 seconds (w/ honest transactions) to 8.2 seconds (w/ injection of 10% Byzantine transactions).

Perlin leverages underutilized compute power in everyday smart-devices, thereby bringing more machines to a task rather than qualitatively bringing far more heavy machines to a specified task.

This, in turn, is far more economical and efficient in completing a customers task on Perlin’s network. In comparison to popular cloud services like Amazon, the cost of hosting in Perlin cloud-based services will be 50% less expensive.

No outages: 
Perlin network use of blockchain will decentralize and distribute storage across connected devices. The data will be replicated to a massively large number of devices thereby protecting against cloud outages and proving round-the-clock service.

According to Statista, The number of smartphone users in the world is expected to be 2.87 Billion by 2020.
“Even smartphone owners can rent away their idle smartphone compute capacity to customers of Perlin Network.”

Data privacy and protection: 
The data is the Perlin network will be distributed and hence no one can have full access to the data except the client itself.

Moreover, organizations can choose if they wish to implement a hybrid (combination of public or private) model or private only which will ensure data privacy.

Additional controls by encrypting data will ensure no third-party knows about the content. These combinations will ensure data protection and help to reduce the cost spent currently by organizations to implement additional security measures.

In 2016, Clutch surveyed IT professionals at medium and large enterprises in the US to determine the value of cloud computing in the enterprise market. Security dominated the discussion. Summary of this survey.

– 75% of enterprises implement additional security measures beyond what the cloud service providers offer, suggesting cloud infrastructure is not secure enough on its own.

– Additional security measures enterprise implement the most is data encryption, followed by identity access policies & regular audits.

– Implementing additional cloud infrastructure security is costly, with more than half of enterprises (57%) spending between $10,000 – $500,000.

Easy Integration: 
For the purpose of smooth transition and integration, Perlin will provide SDKs. IT staff or developers in the organization can write a task in the provided SDK’s, specify how much resources are needed and deploy it.

Also, organizations can opt to either fully adopt all of their components to be hosted under Perlin or partially allowing an easy transition into using Perlin.

SDK stands for “Software Development Kit”. Think of it as a kit to put together a model car or plane. When constructing it, a whole kit of items is needed, including pieces, tools to put them together, assembly instructions, and so forth.

An SDK, in the same way, provides a set of tools, libraries, relevant documentation, code samples, processes, and guides that allow developers to seamlessly create software applications on a specific platform.

Freedom: 
Organizations wanting to use traditional cloud services have to get into the contract which is the biggest concern of organizations which consciously makes them choose not to fully invest in the cloud.

Since Perlin provides a trustless marketplace for cloud computing, organizations don’t have to sign any agreement or contract for using Perlin services.

Organizations currently see the value of migrating to cloud computing but currently are taking a back seat and waiting for the sector to further evolve in technology.

“Blockchain could be the answer”

Perlin Network implementation of blockchain addresses most of the challenges in cloud-computing and may attract backseaters to be front-runners in adopting the tech.

For more information:
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