A Risk Assessment of Piql Services by FFI

As a migration-free solution, there are many benefits to the Piql Preservation Services. Firstly, there is the matter cost efficiency. The need for data migration is very costly. As the volume of digital data which needs storing is growing, so is the storage infrastructure surrounding it. This means that the complexity of data migration is increasing, requiring fresh materials for the storage media and becoming more labour intensive [68]. A lot of resources can be saved, in other words, if this need is removed. However, the benefits relating to increased security, which come as a result of the Piql Preservation Services being a migration-free solution, is of the most importance in this report. Due to the longevity of the piqlFilm, the risk of migration-related data loss is avoided. The data is not lost as a consequence of the decay of the medium storing the information, and neither will it be corrupted or manipulated during the migration process. The piqlFilm is a true WORM technology, meaning that the film is unalterable; once the data is written it cannot be edited [3]. As there is no need to rewrite the data onto a ―healthy‖ piqlFilm every few years, this makes it impossible to manipulate or delete data on the piqlFilm once it is written. This is connected to another major security feature of the piqlFilm: As no migration of the data is needed once it is stored on a piqlFilm, the data is not connected to external networks for longer than strictly necessary, i.e. during production. This greatly reduces the opportunity of a threat actor to logically manipulate or steal the data, which is a major risk when it comes to information security. With alternative storage media, the digital data must be connected to external networks at regular intervals or the data owners stand to lose the data once the storage medium is no longer readable.

11 Recommendations

In the scenario descriptions, which are attached to the report as appendixes, we have briefly listed suitable recommendations to alleviate the risk source identified in the scenarios. In this chapter we provide an overview of these recommendations. We begin by giving some general recommendations and continue with more specific recommendations on how to alleviate the risks to the physical properties of the Piql components, and, lastly, some recommendations concerning computer security. We make recommendations on security measures in general which the Piql partners can implement to keep the piqlFilms they store as protected as possible. We also make additional recommendations to the Consortium partners of alterations to the Piql components, which they may decide to use in later work packages of the PreservIA project.

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FFI-RAPPORT 16/00707