Title: XCloud: An Integrated Cloud Storage Service Account
Date/TIme: September 26th, 2017 @ 3:00 pm
Place: Innovation Center
Major Professor: Wensheng Zhang
Committee Members: Lu Ruan, Jin Tian
Abstract:
People have popularly used cloud storage services, such as Google Drive, Box, Dropbox and Amazon S3, to host their data. The trend has been accelerated by the fact that, people can use many of such services at no charge. However, using cloud storage services has potential risks, for example, storing data into only one storage service could result in being locked-in, and degraded data reliability, availability and security in face of system failure or attacks; using multiple cloud storage services could be very inconvenient to the user. In this project, we aim to address the above limitations through leveraging the diversity and heterogeneity provided by existing multiple cloud storage services. Specifically, we develop a software called XCloud that integrates multiple cloud storage service accounts and provides a single point of access for the user. On behalf of the human user, XCloud manages the integrated storage space associated with all the cloud storage service accounts, and allocates the space to store the user's files based on the characteristics of the accounts, for example, these accounts are supported by cloud servers that are often independent of each other, and the user may have different speeds in uploading and downloading data from different accounts. Utilizing these characteristics, XCloud aims to provide higher level of data reliability, availability and access efficiency, as well as the freedom of the user to select and change the storage service providers. Moreover, XCloud is a software running on the user's premise, and thus is able to protect the data security and privacy for the user, without putting the security and privacy mechanism into the hands of cloud service providers that may not be fully trustable by the user.