Last month's global cloud outage saw dozens of popular websites rendered temporarily inaccessible, with big names such as CNN, The New York Times, $Amazon.Com Inc(AMZN.US)$, and even Great Britain's government home page suffering from the incident. With even an hour-long outage costing millions of dollars in wasted advertising revenues and online sales for some of the world’s largest online businesses such as Spotify and Twitch, outages are unsurprisingly not received well by cloud clients.

The most popular current cloud storage solutions today are centralized, with just a handful of providers raking in millions of dollars servicing the majority of big clients in gaming, streaming, and more. But alongside outages at server farms, an increasing number of security breaches that are caused due to a single point of failure has resulted in the theft of huge amounts of user data in recent months; couple this with high prices, and many businesses are now looking for alternatives.

Gather Network will start deploying its first services for Gather Cloud towards the end of Q3. As part of a multi-layer platform that utilizes blockchain technology to distribute cloud services, enterprise users will benefit from more security and mI ore affordability. Gather Network incentivizes web users and publishers to donate and monetize their processing power, in turn providing businesses anywhere in the world with access to cheaper cloud computing power from a distributed source that cannot be shut down or hacked into.

Taking On The Cloud Monopoly, One Block At A Time 

It has become alarmingly apparent just how big a role a small number of behind-the-scenes cloud providers play in keeping the internet running; a small but incredibly powerful group of corporations essentially hold the keys to the centralized cloud kingdom, with AWS (Amazon), $Alphabet Inc-CL C(GOOG.US)$, $Microsoft Corp(MSFT.US)$, and $Alibaba Group Holding Ltd(BABA.US)$ at the top of the pile and this has led to a monopolistic structure within the cloud industry.

With the effects of the pandemic seeing more people online than ever before, cloud computing has become an ever-central cog in the world of e-commerce, entertainment, and much more, but with prices growing just as quickly as the need for cloud services is, businesses are regularly overshooting their cloud budgets. With such a stranglehold on the cloud industry, players in the cloud monopoly have been able to gradually but consistently ramp up prices for cloud services in recent years, with organizations wasting $17.6 billion on a combination of cloud overspending and idle cloud resources in 2020 alone.

With the unveiling of Gather Cloud and harnessing the power of blockchain technology, businesses no longer have to remain boxed into contracts with overpriced cloud services and can instead rely on the permanent uptime that accompanies a distributed model for cloud processing power; companies even have the opportunity to utilize their own computers to passively donate computing power and redirect it for their own use, essentially becoming a self-servicing cloud computing machine.

As the world moves into an increasingly digital age, our appetite for cloud computing continues to grow. Gather Cloud is poised to supply the world’s enterprise clients with a cost-effective and reliable solution for their processing power that takes the power out of the hands of the few and gives it to web users, publishers, and the businesses themselves.