The IRCoC project aims to make significant advances on the use of a CoC for storage, coordination and execution of critical services, enabling organizations and individuals to benefit from the clouds without requiring complete trust on any single provider. More precisely, the project aims to make two main contributions.

1. We will design new data-centric replication solutions, in which the cloud services (e.g., Rackspace Queue, Amazon DynamoDB) are modeled as fail-prone shared objects where no code or functionality (besides what they provide) can be deployed. The key advantage of this approach is the low costs and the ease of management, since there are no servers to be configured and maintained. We plan to investigate some fundamental theoretical questions on this model and provide practical multi-writer resilient storage and coordination algorithms for this setting.
2. Novel replication protocols will be developed, ensuring the correct execution of web services running across multiple clouds. These protocols will be highly configurable to support different security requirements and adaptable to the conditions of the network and clouds. This will enable a more intelligent deployment of resources, departing from existing solutions that are mostly static.

These protocols will be used for implementing two prototypes: a Dropbox-like personal storage service for the CoC and a PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) middleware for hosting web applications in the CoC.