A fundamental characteristic of our era is the deluge of Data. Since Grid environments, data management in distributed environments is a quite common practice and Cloud systems provide many solutions to store data. A data manager can be defined through its functionalities that can be understood as services, including security, replication strategy, green data transfer, synchronization, data migration, etc. Many ways to design those services exist and each data manager encompasses its own point of view to compose them. Usually, this point of view is centered on applications rather than data, even when an autonomic solution is provided.

The SkyData project aims at breaking the existing rules and the way the data management is in place nowadays. We propose a new paradigm without any centralized control nor middleware. Imagine a world where the data are controlled by themselves! It is a real challenge to provide an autonomic behavior for the data. In this project, we will endow data with autonomous behaviors and thus create a new entity, so-called Self-Managed Data (or SkyData). We plan to develop a distributed and autonomous environment where the data are regulated by themselves. This change of paradigm represents a huge and truly innovative challenge that can be split into three key challenges: the first one consists in a strong theoretical study on autonomic computing; the second one aims at developing the algorithmic support of the concepts; and the third one is the genesis of a prototype with this new generation of data and a significant use case. This latter will show how to use a SkyData environment to create an autonomous data-management system which produces a reduced carbon footprint.