Haar you kidding me cloud? Time to decentralize.

We have good reason to believe the future of computing looks nothing like the present.

The problem with “cloud” computing market consolidation is that it’s not a siloed industry, nearly every industry in the world, be it B2B or consumer-facing, relies on computing power in some way. It’s not an exaggeration to say cloud companies have the ability to cripple entire economies with the flip of a switch — be it accidental or malicious.

Nest security cameras lost several hours of footage, smart-bulb users spent hours waiting for lights to come back on, homeowners with connected gates were locked out, and a host of other connected devices became paperweights during the AWS outage. As the number of “things” connected to the internet skyrockets and starts to include self-driving cars and connected medical devices, it’s easy to see why cloud-only is not a suitable computing infrastructure.

With only each other to compete with when it comes to pricing, cloud providers wield enormous influence over business’s bottom line. Even one’s proximity to a cloud datacenter can help or hinder entire business models: an organization trying to start-up where “cloud” infrastructure is lacking may face debilitating latency issues that could hamstring them before they begin.

Especially for those in some of tech’s most exciting sectors, like “Internet of Things (IoT), Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, High-tech Manufacturing and Healthcare, access to affordable processing power may be the single most important indicator of success. If centralized cloud computing continues to reign, a handful of cloud providers have the power to dictate tomorrow’s technological landscape.

Fortunately, that same unprecedented demand for low-latency, affordable processing power is fueling the movement towards a more distributed computing infrastructure.

And while that sounds like a gloomy forecast, the computing power rental market is far from doomed. Rather, IoT’s requirement for low-latency processing power has forced us to find ways to leverage resource located outside the cloud, on computers that are closer to the devices that need it. It’s an infrastructure called Fog Computing.

Fog computing offers a continuum of computing power spanning the distance between a device and the cloud, so instead of traveling thousands of miles to a centralized datacenter, a smart thermometer could find the processing power it needs on a participating computer in the next room. The same regional datacenter failure that downed security cameras and smart bulbs dependent on AWS would be inconsequential in a Fog architecture, which has a near-infinite supply of failover nodes across the globe.

Of course, the sharing of computing resources is a Utopian ideal without a means of incentivizing participation: just like Amazon charges software developers to run services on their computers in the “cloud”, for a Fog computing infrastructure to work in the real world computer owners must be compensated for the resources they contribute to the network.

With the burden (and profits) of powering the internet distributed across an infinitely broader spectrum of computers, downtime could be a thing of the past, and the unprecedented demand for processing power we’re experiencing is an earning opportunity for computer owners everywhere.

Cloud datacenters may not be going anywhere, but the rental market for computing resources is about to get a LOT more diverse.

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