When preparing the roadmap report I was particularly struck by a remark that was made in relation to this message.

“Scalability is necessary for digital preservation/curation activities to extend beyond large, well funded institutions.”

In other words, scalability should work both ways. It's (probably) just as important for large scale systems to scale down to smaller instances ans it is for them to scale up in order to cope with the ever increasing data deluge.

I'm not sure that this message is understood widely enough, let alone acted upon.

So is it as important to scale up as down? If not, why not?