Funding mechanisms, data privacy, intellectual property concerns, and a culture of skepticism have made science slow to adopt cloud technologies. Yet due to the pervasiveness and utility of consumer technologies like Google Drive, Dropbox, & Slack, the utility of cloud-based scientific software companies, and the open science movement, the attitude around the cloud is changing. Large scale initiatives like the Open Science Framework and the European Open Science Cloud are helping to influence the scientific community and are aimed at reframing the cloud as “appropriate” for science.

However, the challenge for science in the cloud isn’t logistical, it’s cultural and regulatory. Centralized cloud storage (CCS) options are fundamentally at odds with how researchers, librarians, and scientific IT folk view data stewardship (data is their currency and therefore requires its own vault). CCS can cause huge intellectual property problems for University and research institutions (Google technically owns the data on Google Drive) and the ever-changing data privacy and security requirements of Government (see ISO and HIPAA) make cloud configuration and data infrastructure set up prohibitive and sometimes impossible. Yet it is obvious that the old model of housing data on institution or company servers is incredibly expensive from upkeep to management and cause the price of cloud-based software to surge as companies lose the power of managing and deploying a single code base — a major factor in the affordability/scalability of cloud applications- and instead are forced to deal with individual client server environments (local installations for scientific software can start at $10,000…per year). This means software companies have to manage and execute one-off client specific installation protocols, navigate unique server environments, and incur significant project management costs just to deploy updates, bugs, or new features for a single instance of their software. The result is software that should cost as much as Netflix per month, costing as much as Netjets.

The often tragic stories of scientific software startups often starts with ambitions of a SaaS model that proliferates from scientists to scientists and lab to lab (free for as long as possible, $10/month per scientist, so affordable they said) and quickly turns into an enterprise sales heavy business that, due to the long sales cycle of enterprise deals, erodes the culture of innovation around the product and shifts the focus towards $$$; something that is particularly damaging for a field that has such rapid developments. The company then spends more time answering long arduous RFPs that may even ask them how many security guards work at the server center where the application is deployed (this is a real question I encountered), than creating incredible software that pushes science forward.

So what if you can get the power of the cloud with zero compromises in privacy and security? What’s worth taking a look at is the the decentralized cloud storage revolution. Through usage of the blockchain, incredibly exciting (and ambitious) startups like Sia, MaidSafe, and StorJ are building the infrastructure for deploying applications on a fully decentralized cloud storage network.