Digital content is growing exponentially while people are increasingly becoming dependent on it for research, business and leisure. Protecting the born-digital and digitised resources from physical and technical calamities and ensuring long-term availability and access to them is becoming an issue of major importance that institutions are all the more faced with. However, the latter often don’t have the technical capacity or human and financial resources to deal with the constant maintenance and upgrade needs of their digital assets.

Τhe deposit of digital content and data in a trusted infrastructure is, therefore, becoming a prerequisite for the protection of its’ integrity and long-term preservation. Replicating data in the Cloud has significant advantages over storing them in fixed carriers that are prone to degradation and the risk of becoming obsolete.

The Data Protection Service made available by EKT makes back-up copies of the digital content and data in a trustworthy Cloud infrastructure. Data Protection Service in the Cloud (for the long-term secure storage of the digitised cultural content and data) will be, initially available to the Beneficiaries of the Call 31 and 31.2 of the Operational Programme “Digital Convergence”.

Back-up copies of the digital assets will be stored at EKT’s state-of-the-art Datacenter. The Datacenter combines a high-end robust technological infrastructure and up-to-date workflows that can guarantee security in the storage of the digital resources. EKT will be responsible for all maintainance and upgrade costs for the service at no extra cost for the institutions. This results in minimum data maintainance, migration and replication costs on the part of the institutions and also guarantees long-term availability and access to digital resources.