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.
