It shouldn’t be considered a Cloud vs LOCKSS dichotomy. The LOCKSS software can run in the Cloud. But it has been several years since we reviewed the economic model around Cloud storage with LOCKSS. The LOCKSS team will be revisiting this soon.

Key value propositions for LOCKSS include: 

* It supports distributed, local custody as part of a networked community of other participating nodes. The persistence of the preserved content is thus not dependent on the sustainability of a single organization, and community members retain use of and access to that content, while it is preserved.

* It decentralizes risk, by ensuring that content is preserved in multiple sites that are not just geographically diverse, but also reflect a diversity of technical and organizational environments. Heterogeneity minimizes single points of failure.

* It is open source, so it is vendor-independent, transparent, and open to adaptation. We are fostering a community of LOCKSS innovators to share technical advancements based around the platform, and also re-architecting it in a web services framework to make it even more extensible (https://library.stanford.edu/node/130509).

* Claims about its reliability, and its approach to digital preservation are based on peer-reviewed computer science research (https://www.lockss.org/news-media/publications/). The LOCKSS technology achieved TRAC certification with the only perfect score for the “Technologies, Technical Infrastructure, and Security” category (https://www.crl.edu/reports/clockss-audit-report-2014).

* LOCKSS is as much a community of institutions (https://www.lockss.org/community/networks/) that care deeply about digital preservation as it is a technology. Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe; Lots of Communities Keep Stuff Safe.