Archiving as a Service (AaaS) [English]

Syndetic Relationships

InterPARES Definition

n. ~ A service offered by a provider that supports the full range of functions necessary to store, access, and preserve records of long term value while protecting the records' authenticity, reliability, and integrity.

General Notes

Many providers offering archiving as a service do little more than provide off-line storage.

Citations

  • Forman 2012 (†629 p.38): In archiving terms specifically, public, cloud-based archiving involves the use of a third-party storage service, for example. These companies will store and manage assets in remote storage centers, and provide all of the security, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities as part of the service. (†1427)
  • McLellan 2015 (†777 ): UK archiving specialist Arkivum offers long-term data preservation via a mix of on-premises gateways, cloud-based or in-house tape libraries and offline backups. Elsewhere, an archiving price war is brewing between cloud infrastructure giants. (†1964)
  • McLellan 2015 (†777 ): Archiving involves a lot more than dumping vast amounts of data into the cloud, or onto an on-premises tape library. For a start, it only makes sense to archive data that's likely to have some future value, or is required to be retained for compliance purposes. Beyond data curation, there are also issues surrounding discovery, file-format preservation and media longevity to consider, among others. ¶ Arkivum specialises in long-term data preservation -- currently serving mostly higher education and life sciences customers -- using an on-premises (physical or virtual) gateway appliance to copy encrypted data to tape libraries in its data centres. ¶ Storing and managing multiple copies of customers' data in geographically separate locations allows Arkivum to guarantee 100 percent data integrity irrespective of the data volume or retention period -- which can scale from terabytes to petabytes and range between 10 and 25 years respectively. (†1965)
  • Stancic, Rajg, and Milosevic 2013 (†904 p. 113): Basic requirement that provider of archiving service in cloud environment have to meet is to ensure the confidence of internal and external users in entity of origin and its archival holding. That means that provided service is safe and stable. Provider of services should follow all professional and technical regulations and plans or at least enable long-term preservation practice over entrusted digital objects. Objects intended for long-term preservation should remain accessible by usage of methods such as migration, typed object conversion or other digital preservation methods systematized by Thibodeau,9 ideally performed within provided service. Provider of archiving service should be aware that the service is not reduced to providing mere repository for storing digital documents. Service should encompass proactive archival management of (complex) digital objects, their organizational context and provenance. It should guarantee continued usage of archived objects as authentic and trusted sources of evidence for creator and information for present and potential wider user community. (†2725)
  • Taylor 2011 (†903 ): The aim of a cloud archive service is to provide a data storage environment as a service that is optimised for long-term data retention, security and compliance with data regulation policies. Once in the cloud archive, data must be easily searchable via metadata; protected from overwrites or tampering; and provide client -- or legally specified, automatically applied data retention policies. You must also have confidence that your data is in safe hands and protected by sound disaster recovery systems. (†2717)