A walled garden often becomes visible only when an organisation tries to leave. By then, the archive may contain years of content in proprietary formats, with metadata, encryption keys and workflows that all depend on the vendor continuing to operate as expected.
Preferred Media has firsthand experience.
When the vendor’s direction changes
A long time ago, Preferred Media chose BRU PE software to manage its LTO tape archive. BRU was an established solution with a 35-year legacy across government, education, corporate and media organisations. While the software remained supported, its proprietary format did not present an immediate problem.
In 2020, Other World Computing acquired BRU and its customer base. Its direction did not support Preferred Media’s needs, and the software was deprecated. It would no longer run on current operating systems.
Retrieving the content required Preferred Media to:
- Recreate old operating environments
- Source deprecated versions of the software through the user community, not the vendor
- Use that software to read the proprietary tape format
- Migrate everything to an open, industry-standard tape format
The process consumed approximately twelve months of staff and machine time, with some data loss along the way.
Preferred Media did not choose to leave an operating solution. The software it depended on ceased to be supported, turning its proprietary format into a significant and costly point of lock-in. It is the same risk any organisation faces when its archive depends on one vendor’s continued operation.
When organisations decide to migrate
For most organisations, the decision to migrate builds over time:
- A promised capability does not materialise
- Custom development costs more than the benefit it would deliver
- Workarounds consume increasing amounts of staff time
- Support deteriorates or updates become less frequent
In other cases, the trigger is more abrupt. A vendor is acquired, local support is withdrawn, or software updates stop. Unpatched software controlling access to an archive is not just a functionality problem, it is a security and business continuity liability, even if it continues to run.
The longer the problem is left, the harder and more expensive it becomes to address. The archive grows, contracts renew, and extraction costs increase. International vendors operating in Australia may withdraw local support, fall behind Australian legislative requirements, or move data to a less suitable jurisdiction without notice.
What to assess before starting
Before planning the migration, assess the walled garden risks in digital preservation that could affect what can be moved, what it will cost and where data loss may occur:
- Content and metadata. Does the export include every file, metadata field, version, rights record and preservation event?
- Proprietary formats. What needs to be translated before the destination can ingest it?
- Egress costs. What will the vendor charge to extract the full archive?
- Encryption keys. Are the keys required to decrypt and move every encrypted file available? If a vendor cannot produce them, those files cannot be decrypted or loaded. There is no practical recourse.
- Vendor cooperation. What support is still available from the existing vendor? Maintaining a workable relationship with the existing provider helps when technical information or export support is needed. When the provider has ceased operating, those options close quickly.
Any gap between what the existing environment can export and what the destination can accept creates a risk of data loss.
The destination needs at least the same level of scrutiny. It must be able to accept the full export and provide predictable, scalable ingestion for the volume involved. Encryption keys should remain perpetually available to the organisation, with clear export provisions written into the contract. Code held in escrow provides further protection if the new provider ceases operating. The destination must be genuinely open before any content is moved.
What archive migration involves
Extract, transform and load (ETL)
Content and metadata are extracted from the existing environment, transformed into formats the destination can accept and then loaded into the new archive. Each stage must preserve the relationships between the files, metadata, versions, rights and preservation events.
Fixity verification
Fixity confirms that the content has survived the journey intact.
A fixity check compares the digital fingerprint of a file before and after migration. Matching fingerprints show that the file has not changed while a mismatch signals that something went wrong and the file should be quarantined or restored from a verified copy. Every migrated file should be fixity-checked.
Working across two environments
For a large preservation archive, migration cannot be completed over a weekend. The existing environment must remain stable while content is extracted, but staff may still need access to it. Migrated content also begins arriving in the new environment before the transfer is complete.
Organisations may spend months working across both environments. This operational sequencing is often underestimated. Organisations need sufficient time for planning, staging, testing, ingestion and fixity verification before the existing environment can be retired.
What changes after migration
Leaving a walled garden changes what an organisation can do with its archive, not just where the content lives.
Consider a use case of assessing preserved versions of company policies using Retrieval-Augmented Generation, or RAG, to check whether existing archive policies comply with current legislation.
In a closed environment, staff may need to:
- Locate the relevant policies from the archive
- Request their restoration
- Download and save local copies
- Upload them to an AI application
- Run the prompt
- Manage the duplicate files and version control issues left behind
In an open ecosystem with comprehensive API access, the AI can locate the policies through their metadata and review them against the legislation directly. The archive remains the controlled source.
This is what openness provides in practice. An organisation can continue using the archive it has implemented and populated while retaining the degrees of freedom to integrate new services, adopt new technologies or move its content as requirements change.
Plan before you have to
Archive migration is complex, time-consuming and carries real risk of data loss if rushed or poorly prepared. The organisations that navigate it most successfully are the ones that planned before they were forced to and brought in specialists if they didn’t have the expertise in-house.
If your current archive is limiting access to your content, or you are preparing to migrate out of a walled garden, talk to Preferred Media about assessing your archive and planning a path to an open environment.
