A Viability Analysis of an Economical Private Cloud Storage Solution Powered by Raspberry Pi in the NSA Era: A Survey and Analysis of Cost and Security

Abstract

With the advent of increasing breaches and of private data stored in a large number of public cloud storage providers by high level government organizations under the pretext of copyright infringements, national security etc, data privacy is gaining paramount importance. Cheap yet powerful system-on-chip computers like the Raspberry Pi and wide range of community supported software have made running one's own server without spending a lot, a reality. We explore open source cloud storage service alternatives and their feature parity, running one of these services to setup a personal cloud server to protect data privacy and security. We also take a look at the security issues, data availability, cost effectiveness and viability of deploying a personal cloud when compared to some popular public cloud storage providers.