How moving to the cloud took our digital collections to new heights
I’ve written another article about digital preservation at Wellcome Collection, this time about the benefits of moving our data storage and processing to the cloud. Building out this infrastructure is a large part of what I’ve been working on for the last six (!) years.
It’s been really important to me that everyone I work with understands the move to the cloud – not just the software engineers. It doesn’t have to be a detailed understanding, but I want people to at least get the general direction of travel and see why it’s a good idea. Too often “cloud” is used as this vague and nebulous term, and lots of people feel confused and excluded.
This post is part of that work – it frames the benefits of a cloud migration in terms of collections management, not technical architecture. There have been technical wins, but here I’m focusing on better preservation workflows, storing higher-quality files, and removing human bottlenecks.