Permanent, decentralised and secure: 11 reasons why you should choose Akord over AWS for archival (Part II)

If you haven't read Part I, check it out here.

Accessible

Archiving is a serious, meticulously undertaken process with a long history. But the idea around what is involved in this process is changing with the possibilities of digital technology and the interactivity that web2 has ushered in.

Archiving used to be characterised with a file-it-and-forget-it mentality. The focus and majority of work was centred on the initial archiving away of data. Physical archives have been passive and static, difficult to access due to a fixed geographic location.

But digital archives don’t have these physical restrictions; they have collapsed space, requiring only an internet connection, in theory. Digital technology and user-friendly apps have opened up the idea that archives don’t necessarily need to be passive; they can be active, living and breathing tools, where their intrinsic value can be more readily accessed and used by many people, not just a few gatekeepers.

But web2 has failed to deliver on this potential. The big cloud services offer special archiving tiers for their storage, but this data can take up to 48 hours to retrieve and cost you money to do so.

These services are so complex to manage, that centralised cloud archiving has become the domain of IT departments or specialist contractors, locking out or creating huge barriers of entry for a company, organisation or public at large.

Cost-efficient and scalable

Archives, ideally, last for a long time. A very long time.?There are many areas of archiving where storing data “forever” is mission critical: social and cultural, media and entertainment, science and research, to name the obvious.

With this long-term view in mind, it’s worth thinking about your archival solution’s cost over decades, not years.

“Total cost of ownership”, or TCO, is a phrase used to define the lifetime cost of buying an asset. In the case of data storage, to define the TCO we need to know how long we want to store the data for. With cloud storage solutions, it is impossible to define the total cost of ownership if you pay monthly for storage, and have an indefinite retention period for that data. Also, as discussed previously, even if you did have a fixed period of time in mind, you would never truly own that data.

With Akord and Arweave, TCO is effectively known on day 1. That’s because you pay upfront for storage and never again. And you control the data, not a centralised third party.

This means you pay what may feel like a premium to start your archive, but after a decade you've already started paying more with monthly payments on a traditional cloud service. That doesn't?even take into consideration all the costs associated with managing that service and inevitable data migrations as services change terms and prices.

With a service like Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, the cumulative cost of every GB of data stored never stops going up over time. And the more data you add to the archive, the more you compound the effect, spiralling the cost of your archive over the years.

This is why Akord is a truly scalable archiving solution, especially for organisations that are continually archiving more and more data. Many archives are funded through unpredictable sources – grants, public funding, private donations from patrons. You can't scale an archive when you're beholden to gatekeepers whose continued support cannot be counted on.

Without knowing the TCO for the data in an archive it’s difficult to scale an archive without potentially risking its very existence by arriving at some point in the future where the business or organisation can no longer afford its maintenance.

What's more, the Arweave protocol itself is designed to be scalable. As the Arweave team themselves explain:

The blockweave is… designed to enable scalable on-chain storage in a cost efficient manner for the first time. As the amount of data stored in the system increases, the amount of hashing needed for consensus decreases, thus reducing the cost to store data.

What is Arweave? Explain Like I’m Five, Arweave Team

Pay once, store forever. This is the only way an archive can confidently scale.

Collaborative and user-friendly

Akord’s vaults are beautifully designed, interactive and collaborative.

You can invite other team members and set access-level rights, send them messages and receive notifications informing you of activity in the vault.

Managing the data in a vault can be handled through our Command Line Interface and developer tools, or through our web app. Akord, and specifically the web app, is designed to remove all the normal web3 barriers: you don’t need tokens or third party crypto wallets – create your Akord wallet on signup in a few clicks and pay for storage with your credit card. We work with organisations or businesses who are working with large amounts of data to buy storage on the network at a competitive price.?

The Akord app works just as well on your mobile as it does on your desktop. We’ve focused on making the overall user experience feel intuitive and straightforward, taking the best of web2 app experiences and combining that with web3 technology under the hood.

With the web3 archive anyone in your team, regardless of their technical skills, can easily access and contribute to the archive.

Akord’s versatile media viewer is particularly powerful for public archives, where sharing and presenting digital objects in an accessible way to the public is a priority.

Our media viewer supports many file and image formats as well as video and audio. You can switch between focusing on single image at a time or a gallery mode, zoom in on images and PDFs, flick through the pages of a PDF document, change between light and dark mode, and print directly from the media viewer.

Supporting archives that matter most

Archives no longer need to be hidden away. They can be accessed instantly by anyone in your organisation, or with anyone across the globe if that’s what you want.

We believe that a great archive needs a great experience. If your data is valuable enough to be stored forever, then you should do it the justice of being easily accessed and presented in the best possible light.

The tools we have are just the beginning. We’re constantly working on improving the Akord experience, and we have exciting new features in our roadmap for 2023 to further elevate your web3 archives.

If you’re archiving data that is valuable for the social good, preserving what matters most to humanity, then you may be eligible for specialist support and even storage grants for you project.?Please reach out?and let me know more about your work.