Cloud Archive and Long Term Preservation Challenges and Best Practices (2011)

Cloud storage is touted as being the end-all solution to a variety of current business challenges—a very important one being the explosive growth in the amount data that needs to be archived and retained for a long period of time. However, there are significant concerns businesses have raised in putting their data into the Cloud such as: the lack of an industry standard for data validation, what may happen to their data if the Cloud provide dissolves or gets acquired, how to ensure that formats and integrity are maintained if the data needs to be migrated from one Cloud provider to another. Furthermore, regulatory and compliance issues (e.g. digital auditing) may become even more difficult with the use of public clouds for data archiving and preservation. This technical session will address the questions of how companies can successfully utilize the Cloud for archiving and long-term data preservation.

Learning Objectives

The first learning objective is to understand how SNIA defines Cloud Archiving (as opposed to Cloud Storage or Backup) and long term preservation.
The second learning objective is to better understand the challenges that exist in archiving data within the Cloud, migrating data from one Cloud provider to another and how to ensure data integrity is maintained within the Cloud throughout the life of the archive
The third learning objective is to understand how the use of capacity optimization technologies complements the use of the Cloud for archival and long-term retention.