Data encoding and cost optimised distribution for efficient and secure storage in cloud federation

Abstract

Cloud federation is the future paradigm of computing which can reduce cost and avoid vendor lock-in problem. Cloud providers are now collaborating for increasing revenue and building trust among customers and indirectly help in better resource utilisation of every service provider in the federation. In the proposed framework all collaborating service providers share their storage resources and use single sign-on federated identity management model which will reduce the overhead of maintaining multiple credentials and strengthen the authentication process. Initially, files are encrypted with the secret key created with client id, session token and a random number which will improve the data security and based on the service level selected for files erasure codes are applied, which will reduce storage overhead as compared to the traditional replication techniques. Hence overall reliability, availability and security of data stored in the cloud federation is improved.