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.