"In today's world there is a massive data growth; - the amount of data is doubling every second year. For 5% - 10% of these data there is a clear need for secure long term preservation (i.e. beyond 25 years) – and guaranteed access in the future. This is the case for e.g. our cultural/historical/political heritage as well as administrative and scientific records in both public and private sector.
Some 6 years back we saw that there was no targeted technology, solutions or services to support these needs. At this time the ""Cloud"" was about to emerge and we realised that this would impose high risks to data security and privacy. Today we see that data are stolen and misused on a ""daily basis"" and data storage costs are escalating! That is why we set out to perform the necessary R&D to present an innovative holistic solution for secure, long term preservation of digital data.
The context for this project is the significant R&D within the field of secure data storage and digital preservation conducted in two Eurostars projects (E!4873, Archivator and E!7360 MiLoS) as well as two related R&D projects supported by the Norwegian Research Council (AStoR and ArchOptix). Within these projects a total investment of approximately € 17,5 million has been financed by Piql, the project partners and the funding organisations since mid-2009. A network of European partners (i.e. the technology/manufacturing partners in the above R&D projects) are ready to establish a supply chain with materials/technology/systems needed to create a value chain with clients globally to secure competitiveness and growth based on a disruptive European innovation.
Our vision is to reshape digital preservation! Our objectives are:
To change the way the world is preserving valuable data for future use;
To enable data owners to secure their data and protect them from manipulation, - securing privacy;
To significantly reduce the cost of long term preservation - offering a cost saving of 60% - 80%;
To liberate data owners from technology and vendor lock-in;
To make a pan-European solution to become the world leader within a global, growing niche market;
The technologies used today are rather made for the needs of general data back-up and short term storage, and applied within digital preservation in the lack of a true preservation solution.
The above mentioned R&D work has led to the presentation of a unique technology (the ""Piql technology"") and integrated turnkey solution (the ""Piql system"") targeted specifically to solve issues and enable opportunities on the global arena within the area of data security and secure long term preservation of valuable data.
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