It doesn’t matter if you hardly venture online or work for an IVR company; everyone is moving to the cloud.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, cloud computing is basically when you opt out of storing your data and programs on your own computer’s hard drive or on your company servers and instead store this info online.

Here at Plum we’re well aware of the benefits of using the cloud, offering cloud-based IVR systems as some of our main products.

According to a team of researchers headed by Dr. Wenwu Zhu of Microsoft Research Asia, with so much multimedia and other data heading to the cloud, though, we’ve had to avoid a few unforeseen obstacles on our way to mass online storage.

In the team’s recent paper, “Multimedia Cloud Computing: An Emerging Technology for Providing Multimedia Services and Applications,” Zhu and his team write:

Multimedia processing in a cloud imposes great challenges…For multimedia computing in a cloud, simultaneous bursts of multimedia data access, processing and transmission in the cloud would create a bottleneck.

Basically, big chunks of data (images and video for example) take up a lot of bandwidth and can slow the whole system down.

This is of particular concern to companies that run complex software, like an IVR system, from an online cloud.

To avoid this, though, we’ve started creating media with the cloud in mind, and vice versa.

The team writes:

We present a multimedia-aware cloud, which addresses how a cloud can perform distributed multimedia processing and storage and provide quality of service provisioning for multimedia services…Then, we present a cloud-aware multimedia, which addresses how multimedia services and applications…can optimally utilize cloud-computing resources to achieve better quality of experience.