title: Exit Strategies and Techniques for Cloud-based Preservation Services
creators: Matthew Addis
abstract: This poster presents an exit strategy for when organisations use cloud-based preservation services. We examine at a practical level what is involved in migrating to or from a cloud-hosted service, either to bring preservation in-house or to move to another service provider. Using work by Arkivum on providing Archivematica as a hosted service, we present how an organisation can use such a hosted service with assurance that they can exit without loss of data or preservation capability. Contractual agreements, data escrow, open source software licensing, use of independent third-party providers, and tested processes and procedures all come into play. These are necessary to mitigate the risks of a wide range of scenarios including vendor failure, service unavailability, change in customer preservation scale or budgets, and migration to or from an in-house approach. There is an existing body of work on how to trust and measure a service that a vendor might offer, for example using audit criteria for Trusted Digital Repositories or measuring service maturity using NDSA preservation levels. However, there has been far less work on how to quickly and safely exit providers of such services - despite this being an essential part of business continuity and disaster recovery. This poster presents some of the considerations and the practical approach taken by Arkivum to this problem including: use of open source software (Archivematica, and ownCloud), data escrow, contracts and handovers, use of vendor independent standards and interfaces (PREMIS, METS, Bagit) and technical migration support, e.g. exports of databases, configurations, software versions and updates. We believe the experience and approach that we have developed will be of use to others when considering either the construction or the use of cloud preservation services.