A Comparison of Performance-Enhancing Features in SkyDrive and Dropbox

Cloud storage services are increasing in popularity and using a growing amount of bandwidth on the Internet. Insights on how much traffic is generated is needed for a number of reasons. Cloud storage providers are interested in serving their clients efficiently and effectively, and they want to know how their product is performing and how they can improve their service. Internet Service Providers need an indication of the amount of traffic generated by cloud storage. Lastly, users of cloud storage services might want to know how their favorite service performs. At the moment not much is known about the performance of different cloud storage providers, but this paper aims at getting a thorough understanding of those services and their impact on the Internet. This paper focuses on Microsoft SkyDrive, as this is the second most popular cloud storage service [1] and because it has been neatly integrated in the Microsoft Windows operating system. Microsoft SkyDrive will be compared to Dropbox in terms of performance-enhancing features. As shown in [1], Dropbox storage servers are all located in the United States, which is not an optimal solution for clients spread around the world. Also, the way SkyDrive manages and transfers its files will be analyzed to assert whether SkyDrive has deployed more efficient synchronization strategies than Dropbox. This research contributes to getting to know which technologies the state-of-the-art cloud storage services have or have not deployed to increase performance and to gain a thorough understanding of the performance of Microsoft SkyDrive compared to Dropbox’s.