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TELECOMS AND SOFTWARE NEWS
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Tessella provides a different approach to long-term retention
Sue Clarke
Tessella provides a different approach to long-term retention
Tessella, an IT and consulting services company that provides digital archiving technology, is addressing the problem of long-term digital preservation. Its Safety Deposit Box (SDB) offering enables organizations to store and preserve digital information and, more importantly, to access this information even after several years. It is the ability to access content long after the file format it is written in and the application that created it are obsolete that differentiates it from other archiving solutions. Tessella's approach of rendering content in a format that is about to become obsolete to a new format will ensure that content remains accessible. However, as the legality of changing the format of a piece of content has not yet been tested in court, it is too early to say that this is the definitive solution for the problem of long-term retention. Tessella SDB provides a scalable storage system for content that cannot be deleted or changed. The company claims that it can manage information in any format, including documents, spreadsheets, multimedia, raw experimental data, emails, and design information. As well as storing the content, SDB also maintains metadata, security, and retention information. As content is ingested, metadata is automatically extracted, the format is validated, and it is virus checked - something that most archiving solutions do not do. The SDB storage system is constantly crawled to ensure the validity of the content, at the bit level, and content can be searched and retrieved. Tessella renders content into a different format
There is a need to retain many types of content for several decades, and in some cases in excess of 100 years for compliance purposes. As such, the question of how content created now will be readable in 100 years when the application that created it has been obsolete for many decades has been occupying the minds of vendors for several years. No one as yet has provided the definitive answer. The most widely used solution to date has been the development of file formats such as PDF/A and Microsoft's Microsoft XML Open Office File Format, which have been designed to be used long term. However, there is no guarantee that these file formats will not become obsolete and be replaced over time. Another option has been to develop viewers that will read all file formats. However, these viewers need to be updated each time a new file format is developed.Tessella's approach to the problem of long-term preservation is different. SDB retains factual information on file formats and the software that can read and write them, as well as details on the risk of keeping content in a particular file format and how it can be migrated. When a file format is coming to the end of its life, migration tools within the product transform content from the old format to a new format. The SDB framework can be integrated with document management, email, design workflows and other operational systems, and Ovum believes that there is a good market opportunity for Tessella to sell its product to enterprise content management vendors under OEM agreements. Migration of content has yet to be tested in court
The Tessella approach to digital preservation is somewhat controversial as some organizations believe that changing content from one format to another is tantamount to tampering with or changing the content. However, until this issue is tested in court, or a regulator states that this solution is acceptable, there is no definitive answer as to whether this is the case. To counter this argument, the SDB maintains the content in its original format alongside the migrated version, which should reassure organizations that are concerned that their rendered version may be judged to be non-compliant. Ovum is of the opinion that a regulator or court that is offered two versions of a document - a readable one and an unreadable one - will select the one that can be read rather than quibbling about the legality of it, particularly if an audit trail is maintained each time content is rendered into a new format.
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This article is an extract taken from Ovum's Straight Talk service. This daily email bulletin provides our expert's views and opinions on important news and events in global IT and telecoms. If you have a comment or question regarding this article then please submit your details here:
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