Media Inter-Cloud Architecture and Storage Efficiency Challenge

Digital media has been increasing very rapidly, resulting in cloud computing popularity gain. Cloud computing provides ease of management of large amount of data and resources. With a lot of devices communicating over the Internet and with the rapidly increasing user demands, solitary clouds have to communicate to other clouds to fulfill the demands and discover services elsewhere. This scenario is called inter-cloud computing or cloud federation. In this paper, we discuss the importance of inter-cloud computing and present its architecture. Inter-cloud computing also involves some issues, one of which is storage efficiency. We have evaluated some of the most noteworthy cloud storage services, namely: Drop box, Amazon Cloud Drive, Google Drive, Microsoft Sky Drive/One Drive, Box, and Sugar Sync in terms of Quality of Experience (QoE), Quality of Service (QoS), and storage space efficiency. Discussion on the results shows the acceptability of these storage services and their shortcomings.