OpenStack Swift: An Ideal Bit-Level Object Storage System for Digital Preservation

A bit-level object storage system is a foundational building block of long-term digital preservation (LTDP). To achieve the purposes of LTDP, the system must be able to: preserve the authenticity and integrity of the original digital objects; scale up with dramatically increasing demands for preservation storage; mitigate the impact of hardware obsolescence and software ephemerality; replicate digital objects among distributed data centers at different geographical locations; and to constantly audit and automatically recover from compromised states. A realistic and daunting challenge to satisfy these requirements is not only to overcome technological difficulties but also to maintain economic sustainability by implementing and continuously operating such systems in a cost-effective way. In this paper, we present OpenStack Swift, an open-source, mature and widely accepted cloud platform, as a practical and proven solution with a case study at the University of Alberta Library. We emphasize the implementation, application, cost analysis and maintenance of the system, with the purpose of contributing to the community with an exceedingly robust, highly scalable, self-healing and comparatively cost-effective bit-level object storage system for long-term digital preservation.&nbsp

FAIR Forever? Accountabilities and Responsibilities in the Preservation of Research Data

Digital preservation is a fast-moving and growing community of practice of ubiquitous relevance, but in which capability is unevenly distributed. Within the open science and research data communities, digital preservation has a close alignment to the FAIR principles and is delivered through a complex specialist infrastructure comprising technology, staff and policy. However, capacity erodes quickly, establishing a need for ongoing examination and review to ensure that skills, technology, and policy remain fit for changing purpose. To address this challenge, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) conducted the FAIR Forever study, commissioned by the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Sustainability Working Group and funded by the EOSC Secretariat Project in 2020, to assess the current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to the preservation of research data across EOSC, and the feasibility of establishing shared approaches, workflows and services that would benefit EOSC stakeholders. This paper draws from the FAIR Forever study to document and explore its key findings on the identified strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to the preservation of FAIR data in EOSC, and to the preservation of research data more broadly. It begins with background of the study and an overview of the methodology employed, which involved a desk-based assessment of the emerging EOSC vision, interviews with representatives of EOSC stakeholders, and focus groups with digital preservation specialists and data managers in research organizations. It summarizes key findings on the need for clarity on digital preservation in the EOSC vision and for elucidation of roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities to mitigate risks of data loss, reputation, and sustainability. It then outlines the recommendations provided in the final report presented to the EOSC Sustainability Working Group. To better ensure that research data can be FAIRer for longer, the recommendations of the study are presented with discussion on how they can be extended and applied to various research data stakeholders in and outside of EOSC, and suggest ways to bring together research data curation, management, and preservation communities to better ensure FAIRness now and in the long term

Digital curation and the cloud

Digital curation involves a wide range of activities, many of which could benefit from cloud deployment to a greater or lesser extent. These range from infrequent, resource-intensive tasks which benefit from the ability to rapidly provision resources to day-to-day collaborative activities which can be facilitated by networked cloud services. Associated benefits are offset by risks such as loss of data or service level, legal and governance incompatibilities and transfer bottlenecks. There is considerable variability across both risks and benefits according to the service and deployment models being adopted and the context in which activities are performed. Some risks, such as legal liabilities, are mitigated by the use of alternative, e.g., private cloud models, but this is typically at the expense of benefits such as resource elasticity and economies of scale. Infrastructure as a Service model may provide a basis on which more specialised software services may be provided. There is considerable work to be done in helping institutions understand the cloud and its associated costs, risks and benefits, and how these compare to their current working methods, in order that the most beneficial uses of cloud technologies may be identified. Specific proposals, echoing recent work coordinated by EPSRC and JISC are the development of advisory, costing and brokering services to facilitate appropriate cloud deployments, the exploration of opportunities for certifying or accrediting cloud preservation providers, and the targeted publicity of outputs from pilot studies to the full range of stakeholders within the curation lifecycle, including data creators and owners, repositories, institutional IT support professionals and senior manager

Digital Preservation Services : State of the Art Analysis

Research report funded by the DC-NET project.An overview of the state of the art in service provision for digital preservation and curation. Its focus is on the areas where bridging the gaps is needed between e-Infrastructures and efficient and forward-looking digital preservation services. Based on a desktop study and a rapid analysis of some 190 currently available tools and services for digital preservation, the deliverable provides a high-level view on the range of instruments currently on offer to support various functions within a preservation system.European Commission, FP7peer-reviewe

Calm before the storm: the challenges of cloud computing in digital forensics

Cloud computing is a rapidly evolving information technology (IT) phenomenon. Rather than procure, deploy and manage a physical IT infrastructure to host their software applications, organizations are increasingly deploying their infrastructure into remote, virtualized environments, often hosted and managed by third parties. This development has significant implications for digital forensic investigators, equipment vendors, law enforcement, as well as corporate compliance and audit departments (among others). Much of digital forensic practice assumes careful control and management of IT assets (particularly data storage) during the conduct of an investigation. This paper summarises the key aspects of cloud computing and analyses how established digital forensic procedures will be invalidated in this new environment. Several new research challenges addressing this changing context are also identified and discussed

A cost engine system for estimating whole-life cycle cost of long-term digital preservation activities

This research paper presents a cost engine system that estimates the whole life cycle cost of long-term digital preservation (LTDP) activities using cloud-based technologies. A qualitative research methodology has been employed and the activity based costing (ABC) technique has been used to develop the cost model. The unified modelling language (UML) notation and the object oriented paradigm (OOP) are utilised to design the architecture of the software system. In addition, the service oriented architecture (SOA) style has been used to deploy the function of the cost engine as a web service in order to ensure its accessibility over the web. The cost engine is a module that is part of a larger digital preservation system and has been validated qualitatively through experts’ opinion. Its benefits are realised in the accurate and detailed estimation of cost for companies wishing to employ LTDP activities

Icebergs in the Clouds: the Other Risks of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is appealing from management and efficiency perspectives, but brings risks both known and unknown. Well-known and hotly-debated information security risks, due to software vulnerabilities, insider attacks, and side-channels for example, may be only the "tip of the iceberg." As diverse, independently developed cloud services share ever more fluidly and aggressively multiplexed hardware resource pools, unpredictable interactions between load-balancing and other reactive mechanisms could lead to dynamic instabilities or "meltdowns." Non-transparent layering structures, where alternative cloud services may appear independent but share deep, hidden resource dependencies, may create unexpected and potentially catastrophic failure correlations, reminiscent of financial industry crashes. Finally, cloud computing exacerbates already-difficult digital preservation challenges, because only the provider of a cloud-based application or service can archive a "live," functional copy of a cloud artifact and its data for long-term cultural preservation. This paper explores these largely unrecognized risks, making the case that we should study them before our socioeconomic fabric becomes inextricably dependent on a convenient but potentially unstable computing model.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure