Supporting the personal cloud

Using apps on mobile devices as intermediaries for accessing cloud services leads to an app-ification of these services with a focus on device-specific user experiences. However, as the number of computing devices a user owns increases, the importance of cross-platform deployment and cross-platform experience increases. Instead of the user experience on a specific device, the consistent user experience across multiple devices becomes the key concern. Being able to use cloud services in a location, time and device independent manner results in a novel cloud experience. Unlike the device-centric mobile cloud computing the focus is on a user-centric cloud computing experience called personal cloud. In the personal cloud users are able to access their digital assets and services via apps across multiple devices in a seamless manner. This paper focusses on the underlying infrastructure challenges of the personal cloud and presents a consumer-centric cloud portal (C3P) that assists apps in device, time and location independent access of cloud services.