The ENSURE (Enabling kNowledge Sustainability, Usability and Recovery for Economic value) project focuses on the challenges associated with the long-term preservation of data produced by organizations in different sectors, namely health care, clinical trials and finance. A cloud based digital preservation system is in the final stages of development. The following figure shows the architecture of the ENSURE system.

The configuration layer components create the preservation plan used by the preservation solution in the first place and update it whenever the environmental or business needs change. They are run before the initial deployment of the preservation solution and they are re-run periodically in case of any environmental changes.

One major component of the configuration layer is the cost engine. The cost engine is used to predict the ‘whole life-cycle cost’ of long-term digital preservation in the cloud. The cost model is developed following the activity based costing methodology. It may be relevant not just in the three ENSURE use cases but in many other industries. Experts from the digital preservation community helped in qualitatively validating the cost model. There are plans to validate the cost engine quantitatively with real cost values to ensure its generalizability, applicability and validity.

The second layer is the System Runtime. The system runtime provides many services including data management, ingest, archival storage and access. It is the SOA infrastructure for executing the plug-ins selected by the Configuration layer. Different components of the system runtime include Preservation Digital Asset Lifecycle Management, Information Preparation, Ontology Framework and Content-aware Long-Term Data Protection.

Please, visit the project website for more details.