Distributed Cloud Storage Using Network Coding

Distributed storage is usually considered within a
cloud provider to ensure availability and reliability of the data.
However, the user is still directly dependent on the quality of a
single system. It is also entrusting the service provider with large
amounts of private data, which may be accessed by a successful
attack to that cloud system or even be inspected by government
agencies in some countries. This paper advocates a general
framework for network coding enabled distributed storage over
multiple commercial cloud solutions, such as, Dropbox, Box,
Skydrive, and Google Drive, as a way to address these reliability
and privacy issues. By means of theoretical analysis and real–
life implementations, we show not only that our framework
constitutes a viable solution to increase the reliability of stored
data and to ensure data privacy, but it also provides a way to
reduce the storage costs and to increase the download speed
significantly. Our measurements show that the download time
could be reduced up to six fold in some scenarios exploiting four
commercial cloud solutions.