Deduplication-Assisted Data Reduction and Distribution in Cloud-of-Clouds

With the increasing popularity and cost-effectiveness of cloud storage, many companies and organizations have moved or planned to move data out of their own data centers into the cloud. However, solely depending on a particular cloud storage mprovider has a number of potentially serious problems [1]. First, it can cause the so-called vendor lock-in problem for the customers, which results in prohibitively high cost for clients to switch from one provider to another. Second, it can cause service disruptions, which in turn will lead to SLA violation, due to cloud outages, resulting in penalties, monetary or other forms, for the service providers. Third, solely depending on a particular cloud storage provider can also result in possible increased service costs and data security issues, such as the data leakage problem. Thus using multiple independent cloud providers, so called Cloud-of-Clouds, is an effective way to provide better availability for the cloud storage systems.