Due to the rapid evolution of cyberspace, the question of a better data storage platform has been nullified. The enormous capacity of data storage within cyberspace is enough to record unlimited amounts of information. About 55 million tweets are being sent in just a day, which includes web links and picture content; and over 30 million content types – such as news stories, web links, blog posts, photo albums, and videos – are being shared every month on Facebook. The demand on these content-rich web pages, interactive communications, digital media, and software downloads, required a new approach to content delivery to cater to the ever-growing data volume and its Quality of Service – QoS. As such, novel data systems are evolving in order to accommodate.

The Challenges of Quality and Quantity in Cyberspace

Multimedia content is being delivered through a technology called Content Delivery Network (CDN). This technology optimizes network usage through caching servers, dedicated network links, and peer-to-peer technologies. Just like a conventional CDN, video streaming CDNs utilize a collection of private servers that are distributed around video service provider networks in order to optimize performance.

To meet the challenges of multimedia’s huge data volumes, and to maintain the quality standards of streaming and caching HD videos, cloud computing as a data system is quickly spreading over cyberspace. This variant of multimedia CDNs involves the streaming and storage of video content in the cloud.

Cloud Computing – A Blessing in Disguise for Multimedia

Cloud computing has attracted many big organizations and companies for use as a means of storage, for various reasons. Some of the reasons involve the growing need for bigger storage platforms where content can be stored and accessed at any time. The most visible advantages of multimedia cloud computing are:

• Educational service tool: cloud storage is widely used by educational institutions for storing and retrieving data at any time. Lectures, documents, portals, videos etc, are access easily on the cloud.
• Ubiquitous data centre: data is being stored and retrieved at the same time, which makes the data centre accessible and up-to-date at all times.
• Distributed storage media: search tools have maintained their speed and functionality through parallel processing rather than utilizing one centralized server to crawl data on the cloud.

Challenges of Media Cloud Storage

There are some limitations to cloud computing which are still being optimized. Researchers are providing newer models on cloud computing multimedia framework for better functionality. It is expected that as cloud computing has rendered the best cyberspace storage technology, it will prove to enhance its standards in the same way. A couple of challenges that cloud computing is facing are:

• QoS adaptation against network band-width: quality has to be met with quantity. As network bandwidth is widely increasing in cloud storage, the service quality is being compromised. However, over a decade, advancements have been made to eradicate this problem.
• A disruptive technology for mobile computing: cloud computing is widely regarded as disruptive technology for mobile applications and services. This is because of the resulting power consumption in mobile phones for multimedia. Excessive data on the cloud causes batteries to drain quickly.

Regardless of the challenges, cloud computing is here to stay and will continue to develop, in time eliminating the issues and overcoming these barriers.