PiCsMu: A system to aggregate multiple heterogeneous Cloud Services´ storage

Despite of the observed Cloud Services´ (CS) heterogeneity, e.g., different APIs (Application Programming Interface), different accounting and charging models, and different security and privacy levels, one common aspect is that CSs provide a large amount of storage. CSs provide generic storage when it accepts to store data in any data type (e.g., Dropbox, Amazon S3). CSs provides data-specific storage when it accepts to store data only represented in specific data types (e.g., Google Picasa, SoundCloud). Therefore, PiCsMu (Platform-independent Cloud Storage System for Multiple-Usage) was developed to (1) aggregate multiple CSs´ storage despite of the accepted data type, (2) provide enhanced privacy, and (3) enable a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing network relying on CSs´ storage instead of peers´ storage. The demonstrator use case shows how a PiCsMu user can upload, download, and share files with other PiCsMu users, especially highlighting: (a) the hybrid approach used by the PiCsMu system, showing that data is stored in CSs and the P2P network acts as a management overlay; (b) the PiCsMu social capabilities, showing that PiCsMu users are able to find and share content to existing Online Social Network friends; and (c) the fragmentation and data encoding, showing that both processes enable higher privacy levels since data is stored in multiple different CSs and is imperceptible to CSs´ data validation.