Heritage in the Cloud
Balancing Access and Sovereignty
The Promise of Cloud Hosting
For many heritage organisations, cloud platforms offer an appealing solution. They provide scalable storage, global accessibility, and integration with powerful AI and XR tools. Vast datasets, from digitised manuscripts to 3D scans, can be made available to researchers, educators, and the public with unprecedented reach.
For smaller institutions, the cloud often feels like a lifeline: affordable, easy to deploy, and less reliant on scarce in-house IT expertise. The ability to connect archives, museums, and galleries across geographies creates new opportunities for collaboration and audience engagement.
The Risks of Commercial Platforms
Yet convenience comes with trade-offs. Hosting heritage data on commercial clouds can raise difficult questions:
Data sovereignty: Who ultimately controls access to cultural assets?
Commercialisation: Will heritage data be used to train AI models without consent?
Longevity: Are cloud providers committed to preserving these assets for decades, not just years?
These risks are not theoretical. As major platforms increasingly integrate heritage content into their wider AI ecosystems, institutions face the challenge of ensuring their collections are not quietly repurposed in ways that undermine their custodial responsibilities.
Community-Led and Sovereign Alternatives
Some organisations are beginning to ask whether entrusting cultural heritage to global tech providers is the only option. Sovereign clouds, infrastructure hosted nationally or regionally, are one answer. By keeping data within defined jurisdictions, they ensure that heritage assets remain subject to local laws, ethical standards, and cultural expectations. For many, this feels more aligned with the principle of stewardship.
Equally promising are community-led platforms, where groups of institutions pool resources to build and manage shared repositories. These might be regional heritage networks, university consortia, or international collaborations bound by common values. Crucially, these models allow decision-making to remain with those closest to the collections, not outsourced to a commercial provider’s terms of service.
Community-led approaches also encourage knowledge-sharing and capacity-building. Smaller museums or archives, which might lack the technical expertise to manage large-scale digital infrastructure alone, can benefit from collective governance and shared technical support. By collaborating, they gain a stronger voice in setting ethical standards for digitisation and data use.
However, these approaches are not without challenges. They require sustained investment in infrastructure and skills and often rely on funding that is less predictable than commercial contracts. Yet, they provide something commercial clouds cannot: genuine alignment with cultural values, long-term stewardship, and trust that heritage assets won’t be repurposed for goals outside the community’s intent.
For heritage organisations, community-led and sovereign approaches are not just alternatives to the commercial cloud, they represent a chance to reimagine stewardship in the digital age, placing control firmly in the hands of those responsible for cultural memory.
Finding the Balance
For many organisations, the answer may not be an either/or choice but a hybrid approach. Commercial cloud services can provide scalability and global reach, while sovereign or community-led platforms ensure sensitive or high-value collections remain under closer control. The challenge lies in drawing the line between what should be universally accessible and what requires stricter stewardship.
A balanced strategy often involves tiering datasets. Public-facing digital exhibitions, for example, may be hosted on commercial platforms to maximise accessibility, while raw scans or sensitive cultural artefacts are safeguarded in sovereign or community-managed repositories. This dual approach allows heritage bodies to combine the best of both worlds, reach without relinquishing control.
Contracts and partnerships with commercial providers also need to be framed more carefully. Heritage organisations can demand transparency over data use, restrictions on secondary exploitation, and commitments to long-term accessibility. These conditions may not eliminate the risks of dependency, but they can help mitigate them.
Another element of balance is capacity-building within institutions. By investing in staff training and developing internal expertise, heritage bodies can become more discerning consumers of cloud services. This ensures decisions are proactive and strategic, rather than reactive to vendor offerings.
Ultimately, finding the balance is about more than technology choices. It’s about aligning infrastructure with values: ensuring that heritage data is preserved responsibly, shared appropriately, and protected against exploitation. A thoughtful mix of commercial and community-led solutions gives heritage organisations the resilience they need in a rapidly shifting digital landscape.
Final Thought
Heritage data is more than information it is cultural memory. The decisions organisations make today about hosting will shape how future generations experience and interpret the past. Balancing access and sovereignty is not easy, but it is essential if digital heritage is to be both widely shared and responsibly stewarded.
