Meta-cloud: A cloud of clouds

As smart device hardware and software technologies have advanced, performance of devices has improved and their types and categories have diversified. In addition, as smart devices have become popular, the number of multi-devices held by a single person has increased. Following this trend, data production and management through multi-devices of a single user have increased, and various data sharing services have emerged to meet the need for data sharing across multi-devices. Much attention has been given to data sharing services utilizing a cloud computing environment. Cloud computing is a computing technology to provide IT resources (e.g., software, storage, and server) with internet technology. Data sharing services are provided by virtualizing unlimited storage space and computing resources utilizable via the cloud computing environment. Users have access to unlimited storage space for their devices and can share the same data regardless of which device is used. There are a number of pay or free cloud storage services available, but cloud service providers have their own proprietary interfaces so that users may have to install a specific application program for the use of a cloud or data management service in order to access multiple cloud storage services. In the present paper we define and propose the Meta-Cloud, which is an integrated platform for the use of multiple cloud storage services.