The cloud has become a central facet of both the modern economy and the way we view digital technology in general. Over the past few years alone, business professionals in just about every industry imaginable have witnessed the cloud enter, disrupt, and eventually dominate virtually every sector of the marketplace. Despite the cloud’s impressive rise to prominence, however, there are reasons to believe that a forthcoming contender could dethrone it and become the new basis of the world wide web.
Will named data networking kill the cloud for good? Proponents and critics alike agree that there’s some time to go before named data networking takes off, but many are quickly coming to view this emerging technology as a major disruptor that could finally be what kills the cloud.
Say goodbye to your IP addresses
Perhaps the most eye-catching aspect of named data networking is that it effectively renders IP addresses useless. IP networking has largely remained the same over the past few decades, with precious few advancements having been made to seriously disrupt the market. The new arrival of named data networking could change that, however, as many tech specialists view this technology as having the potential to upend the way we connect with one another through the internet. The location-based nature of IP networking could come to hamstring it in the near-future, as named data networking describes digital content in a much more amenable fashion than the cloud-based tactics of yesteryear.
Named data networking stands apart from other network services by retrieving objects by name rather than by location. This stands to seriously upend our existing internet architecture, which is heavily based upon TLS and cloud technology that named data networking can easily replace sooner rather than later. By using data names instead of IP addresses to deliver information from one user or device to another, named data networking could be the technology that finally breaks us out of the cloud and helps make the smart home of the future a real possibility. The ability of named data networking to offer cloud-dependent IoT capabilities is perhaps the most exciting aspect of this nascent innovation.
Low-power IoT networks could soon become supercharged by named data networking, which threatens to break the grip that cloud technology current has over the rising IoT industry. Research has consistently proven that named data networking doesn’t have to remain stuck in the standard network infrastructure paradigm it was designed for. As time goes on, you’ll likely observe many proponents of the IoT championing NDN technology as being a serious opportunity for escaping from the confines of the cloud.
NDN can offer a more interconnected future
The chief reason that some believe named data networking can kill the cloud is that it offers many innovative concepts like name-based routing and in-network caching that can radically upend established ways of managing the ever-growing internet. With the IoT growing in size and scope on a daily basis, and with literally billions of additional devices expected to become parts of the grid over the next few years, it’s perfectly reasonable that nascent technologies like NDN can soon become pivotal aspects of the digital economy.
It should thus be of little surprise that major tech companies are partnering up with leading universities that have developed Rehmannia to churn out more research surrounding NDN technology. Powerful companies like Huawei and Cisco have already bought into the notion of eliminating IP addresses entirely, with the latter company having recently made an important acquisition which could help it become a leader in the NDN space. Over the next couple of years, don’t be surprised as other major tech companies sprint to invest in NDN technology while it’s still in a promising stage where anyone can take command of the industry. While NDN is still some time away from mainstream adoption, the support of these major companies and the funding they provide will help buoy this technology’s prospects as it gears up to potentially kill the cloud.
A number of serious challenges remain in the path of named data networking before it can become the universally-accepted means of organizing the future internet, however. Certain real-time traffic cannot be cached, for instance, and the rapidly-growing prevalence of video and live streaming content on modern networks will thus be a serious challenge for NDN proponents. Dense application encryption will pose a serious threat to the widespread proliferation of NDN, as the fact that more apps are becoming densely encrypted will limit the amount of caching that can be done at the network layer. It’s thus clear to see that while NDN is immensely promising, there remain a number of hurdles that must be overcome before it can pose a serious threat to the all-dominating cloud.
Corporate networks would be seriously upended by NDN
Another threat to the success of NDN in the long-term is that it seriously threatens to upend existing corporate network infrastructure. Sharing data over public networks in a secure fashion is a treacherous game, but the widespread adoption of NDN could provide an additional layer of security by making sure that only the senders and recipients of information know which data packets need to be reconstructed to make sense of the message within. This is both good and bad news for the nascent technology; while it promises to make corporate network communications more secure, its disruptive nature will also disincentivize existing networks from embracing it.
Given that NDA is entirely new architecture, we shouldn’t expect it to debut and radically reshape our economy until it’s been given more time to find its footing in the world. Just as the cloud first arose in fits and starts only to suddenly leap to prominence, so too may NDA technology be currently shunned but later widely embraced. Named data networking will be unlikely to truly kill the cloud, however, until it enjoys mainstream adoption in a marketplace no longer interested in IP addresses. Until that day comes, excited NDN enthusiasts will have to be patient as they wait for cloud technology to finally be eclipsed.
