"A risk assessment of the Piql Services" by FFI

Finally, the supplier of the piqlVault system is the smallest stakeholder in the functionality of the Piql Preservation Services. The only type of data they have access to, and are thus affected by, is the reel ID and local ID used in the piqlVault system. A security breach here would only result in loss of availability of the information stored, not its integrity, and would only damage the business image of the piqlVault provider.

10 Alternatives for Digital Storage

10.1 Existing Digital Storage Technologies

This report consists of a risk assessment of the Piql Preservation Services, where its functionalities and security qualities have been described and analysed in a security context. To give the reader a better understanding of the properties of the Piql Preservation Services, this chapter will place the system in a wider context and relate it to the other technologies of digital storage which are used commercially today. We first give an overview of the existing storage media available today and an introduction to their qualities, particularly with regards to their storage capacity and longevity. Next, we briefly assess their security qualities compared to the Piql Preservation Services before, finally, certain features of the Piql Preservation Services are outlined, which illustrates how it is better suited for long-term preservation. The storage media included in this brief presentation of alternatives for digital storage are hard disk drives (HDD), optical disks (CD (Compact disc)) and magnetic tapes (LTO (Linear Tape Open)). Hard disk drives (HDD) have been the main form of persistent data storage in computer systems for decades, and much of the development of file system technology is predicated on their behaviour. The HDD offers a cost efficient and easy accessed way to store and retrieve data. The data is recorded by magnetising a thin film of ferromagnetic material [57]. Hard disks consist of one or more metal platters mounted on a central spindle where each platter is covered with a metal coating. The entire unit is contained in a sealed chamber. The number of platters included, and the density of the bits in the device, decides the storage capacity of a hard disk. The maximum storage capacity is 10 terabyte (TB) per disk [57, 58]. There is one obvious disadvantage to the HDD: To gain optimal performance of the hard drive the read/write heads must be extremely close to the disk without actually touching it. This means that a human hair, a dust particle or even a fingerprint can bridge the gap and cause the head to crash, which can destroy the data in the area of the crash [59]. These high failure rates make hard disks inappropriate for long-term preservation. Due to the relatively short lifespan of 10.1.1 Hard disk drive (HDD)

86

FFI-RAPPORT 16/00707