The cloud. It used to be a mass of condensed water before it became a buzzword in the tech industry. Now, billions of people rely on “the cloud” for their digital lives.

However, the problem with “the cloud” is that data has to be stored somewhere, usually on a computer or replicated across several computers. It’s not literally up in the air — and despite some fancy software which can alleviate some of the sore-spots, it’s still a “centralized” system.

That’s where a new contender takes it’s place, and it’s in the form of blockchain technology. You might be thinking that blockchain is another buzzword, but then again, so was “the cloud” before it became a huge part of our lives.

Consider your average database, which contains all the information required to run a modern app, and it’s humming away nicely on a computer in a data storage center somewhere right now.

Now imagine that the database isn’t sitting on a computer, but rather the data is completely fragmented and split across multiple computers. This group of computers all have the same ‘shard’ of data on them, so that if one of them go down; the others are still there — even if they’re located in completely different locations. Hacking into one of them would reveal only a shard (fragment) of data without any context, and each computer is encrypted differently.

There are many groups of computers that hold the data shards, which eventually piece together to form the actual database — but none of the groups hold more than half of the actual data, so it can never be pieced together without the data entry keyholder. These special groups are called Swarms, and they will be the next cloud for databases. Oh, and they’re not in a data centre, they’re your personal computers that have more than enough power and bandwidth to perform these functions.

Except this time, there’s no single point of failure. The database can now scale up and down as needed across the world. It’s secure, and because it takes advantage of a combination of technologies leading up to where we are now, they’re also fast.

That’s the simple way of explaining the next iteration of cloud, but if you want to learn more you can talk directly to the pioneers of this new database system on Bluzelle’s open Telegram today.