GLAMP in the Cloud: Leveraging Microsoft Azure for Digital Preservation
Digital preservation for GLAMP institutions like museums, libraries, archives, and performing arts organizations is often overlooked. But it’s critical to the long-term sustainability and accessibility of digital cultural heritage.
Digital preservation ensures the survival of critical historical records, artifacts, audio-visual materials, and documents that define our cultural heritage sector.
Without digital preservation, there’s a heightened risk of losing irreplaceable knowledge. Unique digital assets may become inaccessible due to technological obsolescence or data degradation.
The rapid expansion of digital information across sectors—such as cultural institutions, businesses, and governments—has made it essential to preserve digital assets over time. Discover why effective digital preservation is crucial and how it can safeguard your institution’s future with cloud-based solutions like Microsoft Azure.
Defining digital preservation
The Digital Preservation Coalition, a UK-based organization that advocates for digital preservation, defines it as the “series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary and all of the actions required to maintain access to digital materials beyond the limits of media failure or technological and organizational change.”
Understanding what digital preservation encompasses is vital to digital asset management and a practice that Terentia values.
Understanding digital preservation: what it is (and isn’t)
Digital preservation is often seen as being nebulous or misunderstood. This lack of clarity can hinder effective implementation, making it essential for GLAMP institutions to seek accessible solutions that demystify digital preservation activities.
What isn’t digital preservation
Digital preservation is often confused with backups. But there is a lot more to digital preservation than just backing up your data into storage.
Backups don’t address the long-term challenges of maintaining usability and accessibility. Digital files that have simply been backed up or stored can degrade or become unusable over time and cannot maintain file integrity.
Backups are essential for protecting data from short-term loss. However, they are only one activity in the series of activities necessary for digital preservation.
Digitization is also often mistaken for digital preservation. While digitization converts physical materials into digital formats, digital preservation is what ensures those digital files maintain their integrity and long-term accessibility.
What is digital preservation
Think of digital preservation as strategic actions that are taken to maintain the integrity of a digital asset throughout its life. The Digital Curation Centre provides an excellent Curation Lifecycle Model that depicts these strategic actions at a high level.
Digging deeper into what these actions include, you find the use of preservation metadata to capture all of the information that explains how the digital asset can be interpreted, used, and maintained in the future.
Additional key actions include continuous monitoring, evaluation, and maintenance of digital assets through check-sums, and periodic interventions, such as file format migrations.
Digital preservation resources
The following resources provide excellent guidance on preparing and implementing digital preservation activities in your organization:
Open Archival Information System (OAIS): Presents a model as a framework to follow to help understand and implement digital preservation activities.
National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) levels of preservation is a framework with a tiered approach to help organizations, especially those with limited resources, prioritize and assess their digital preservation efforts and incrementally improve the preservation of their digital content.
Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Rapid Assessment Model (RAM): Provides a maturity model designed to help organizations assess and improve their digital preservation capabilities.
Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification (TRAC): Offers a set of guidelines and criteria used to evaluate and certify digital repositories as reliable and sustainable over the long term. TRAC ensures that repositories are capable of preserving digital information in a way that is secure, accessible, and authentic for future use.
Why is digital preservation important in cultural heritage?
Digital preservation is imperative in cultural heritage. It ensures the long-term survival, accessibility, and integrity of digital artifacts, records, and knowledge that define and reflect the cultural identity, history, and values of societies.
As more cultural heritage materials are digitized or born-digital—such as documents, artworks, photographs, films, and music—the need for effective digital preservation strategies becomes essential to protecting this information from technological obsolescence, data corruption, and loss.
Challenges in digital preservation for GLAMP institutions
Digital preservation requires managing digital assets in an ongoing process that can encounter various challenges, including:
Format obsolescence and technological change: Digital assets, software, and hardware can become obsolete quickly, making it difficult to access or interpret older digital content.
Data corruption: Digital assets get unintentionally altered or experience degradation over time.
Storage scalability: The amount of digital assets being generated is growing at an exponential rate.
Resource limitations: Smaller institutions in particular face significant limitations in terms of budget, staffing, and technical infrastructure for digital preservation.
This is a high-level view of key challenges, not an exhaustive list. For this reason, GLAMP institutions should evaluate their digital preservation readiness, maturity level, and available resources before expanding their efforts.
The role of cloud storage in digital preservation
Cloud storage plays an increasingly important role in digital preservation today, particularly for GLAMP institutions. GLAMP institutions must think strategically about their storage requirements, carefully monitor their use, and optimize storage tiers to manage costs.
Let’s explore the differences between traditional and cloud storage.
Traditional storage
In traditional approaches to digital preservation, GLAMP institutions store digital assets on physical media, such as hard drives, tape drives, optical media, local and networked servers, or data centers.
Traditional storage also requires institutions to handle the hardware, maintenance, upgrades, and backups themselves.
As a result, dedicated IT personnel are needed to manage and ensure digital assets are protected from hardware failure, corruption, or even natural disasters. This often comes with high costs, limited scalability, hardware obsolescence, and complex backup strategies.
Cloud storage
Cloud storage, on the other hand, relies on using remote servers hosted on the internet to store data, instead of managing physical hardware and requiring dedicated IT staff.
Benefits that cloud storage offers include:
Scalable, on-demand, and cost-effective growth: Cloud storage allows institutions to scale their storage capacity up or down based on their needs. This enables a pay-as-you-go model where institutions only pay for the storage they use, reducing unnecessary expenses.
Built-in redundancy, disaster recovery, and long-term data integrity: Cloud storage typically offers continuous monitoring for data corruption and fixity checks to verify files remain unchanged. Geo-redundancy, automatically replicating data across multiple data centers in different geographic locations ensures data availability if there is a failure, data loss, or natural disaster at one site.
Automatic software updates and backups: Cloud storage providers automatically manage and deploy updates and automated backups without requiring user input.
Global online access: Users are able to access their data from any location with an internet connection.
Enterprise-level security measures: Cloud storage platforms implement data encryption, multi-factor authentication, threat detection systems, vulnerability patches, and compliance with industry-specific regulations and standards.
How Terentia leverages Microsoft Azure to support digital preservation
As a cloud-native solution, Terentia leverages Microsoft Azure to host its web applications and manage the storage, processing, and distribution of digital assets.
Digital assets are processed using Azure App services, automating workflows for processing tasks, such as uploading digital files, file conversion, and optimization. These assets are hosted in Azure Blog Storage, which is optimized to handle large amounts of unstructured data.
Some other key features of Terentia’s use of Microsoft Azure include:
Data tiering for access and cost efficiency: Allows users to adjust their storage capacity around their needs, including:
Hot tier for frequently accessed data
Cold tier for data that is infrequently accessed but must be preserved for long periods.
Archive tier for long-term cold storage of digital assets that need to be preserved, but rarely accessed.
Single-tenant environments: Your data is never stored with anyone else's.
Redundancy and geo-replication: Ensures continuous access to your Terentia platform.
Encryption and security features: Safeguards your data from unauthorized users.
Automated migration: Mitigates data corruption by automatically moving files from obsolete storage to maintain integrity.
Automatic data backup and disaster recovery: Guarantee your data is safe in the event of a natural disaster.
Benefits of using Terentia’s Azure-powered features
By integrating Microsoft Azure in such a way, Terentia can help GLAMP institutions more easily and efficiently:
Strategically manage and access digital assets in tiered storage.
Automate workflows for digital preservation including continuous monitoring for data corruption, fixity checks, and file format migration.
Ensure automated backups with geo-redundant storage, replicating data across multiple regions.
Implement disaster recovery with backup copies in secondary regions.
Terentia provides enterprise-level data encryption and compliance with industry standards, all powered by Microsoft Azure.
Additionally, GLAMP institutions can scale their usage and expenses according to their needs, without having to invest in expensive infrastructure, making Terentia a valuable DAM solution for small and large institutions.
Use case: Microsoft Azure in museums and cultural institutions
From small to large institutions, Terentia clients see a wide range of benefits from the integrated Azure functionality, including:
Simplified long-term preservation of high-resolution images, videos, and documents.
Secure, remote access for both researchers and the public.
Reduced cost for on-premise storage maintenance.
Increased efficiency and reduction in time taken to ingest assets.
See firsthand accounts about how GLAMP institutions are benefiting in Terentia’s case studies.
Simplify your digital preservation work with Azure-powered Terentia
Without proper attention to digital preservation, your irreplaceable digital cultural heritage is at risk of being lost. Terentia’s platform powered by Microsoft Azure ensures long-term data integrity, accessibility, and protection.
Reach out today for a demo or to learn more about how Terentia can help safeguard your digital assets.