Designing digital preservation solutions: a risk management based approach

Abstract

Digital preservation aims at maintaining digital objects accessible over long periods of time, ensuring the authenticity and integrity of these digital objects. In such complex environments, Risk Management is a key factor to assure the normal behaviour of systems along time. Currently, the digital preservation arena commonly uses Risk Management concepts to assess repositories. In this paper, we intend to go beyond and propose a perspective where Risk Management can be used to assess existing solutions, but also to conceive digital preservation environments. Thus, we propose a Risk Management based approach to design and assess digital preservation environments, enclosing: (i) the definition of context and identification of strategic objectives to determine specific requirements and characterize which consequences are acceptable within the identified context; (ii) the identification, analysis and evaluation of threats and vulnerabilities that may affect the normal behaviour of a specific business or the achievement of the goals and conformance to the requirements identified in the context characterization; and, (iii) definition of actions to deal with the risks associated with the identified threats and vulnerabilities. We generalize and survey the main requirements, threats, vulnerabilities and techniques that can be applied in the scope of digital preservation.