Submitted by gail on Mon, 02/03/2014 - 8:08am
Top 5 questions to ask before outsourcing your archives to a cloud vendor
Curate, Preserve, Archive – you’ll probably agree that these words are neither used nor understood by the major cloud providers. There’s been a gaping lack of understanding around what archivists and librarians need in order to feel safe outsourcing their digital archives to the cloud. To be viable as a place to digitally preserve content forever (or many decades), cloud storage needs to do more than protect the bits for the long term. There are data ownership, location, authenticity and provenance considerations, among others.
Here are the first five questions I recommend asking a cloud storage vendor – and what to look for in their reply – to help you determine if they are the right choice for hosting and preserving your archives. (More questions - including security and geographic separation - in my next blog.)
