Archiving and Preservation in the Cloud: Business Case, Challenges and Best Practices

Unstructured data explosion, internal company policies and compliance regulations are redefining the way organizations store and manage their information. As a result, more and more companies are being required to archive data for a decade or longer. The amount of storage space required for the archived data grows each year; increasing the need for investments in storage for data that needs to be retained and preserved to meet the business requirements. Enter Cloud storage, which promises to provide access independence, improved capacity elasticity and lower up-front capital expense in comparison to traditional in-house storage models. SNIA has developed a Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) specification to help both companies and customers take the most advantage of cloud storage. To this end, the Cloud Archive and Preservation Special Interest Group (CA&P SIG) has developed its own definitions and profiles for different Cloud Digital Archive Services that take advantage of the CDMI specification. This session will address the work the CA&P SIG is doing to identify the challenges and best practices of storing data in the Cloud for long term, including how to describe the different levels of archiving and preservation services offered by cloud providers using the SNIA CDMI specification as a reference. Additionally, this session will compare the different services profiles and specifically, the CDMI specification attributes applicable to each profile.

Learning Objectives

Better understanding of SNIA’s definitions of Cloud Digital Archive and Long Term Preservation service profiles and their differences
Understand where Cloud Digital Archive Service can be useful for their IT environments
Understand the importance of CDMI as it relates to Cloud Digital Archive space and how different Cloud provider profiles can leverage the specification