Future proofing ensures products and information remain relevant and accessible in the future. It varies by industry, but can involve designing software and hardware to work with future innovations, and ensuring data storage formats remain readable.
Future proofing is a process by which efforts are made to ensure that products and information manufactured or archived today will still be relevant or accessible in the future. This can be done in different ways and can mean slightly different things for different industries and businesses. A software developer, for example, can try to “future-proof” a program under development by ensuring that the code is likely to work with innovations in programming and hardware that may occur in the future. Future-proofing isn’t necessarily an exact process, but it’s usually based on efforts to imagine technology and culture in the future.
How you attempt or achieve future fix can be very different depending on the particular industry for which you are attempting fix. Software development is an important field where future proofing of products is a concern. While updated versions of software often become available and released, most developers want to ensure that the software is still usable with new hardware and other programs released in the future. If a company released a new product that wasn’t compatible with a device released just a year later as standard for many users, that product would almost immediately seem obsolete or irrelevant.
Computer hardware is also generally developed with an eye to future proofing. Printers, monitors, motherboards, and internal hard drives are usually designed to work with whatever technology is modern at the moment. The hardware would still need to work with technology released not long after, however, to ensure that the company making the hardware maintains a reputation for forward thinking. Many customers want to believe that the technology they buy is a reliable investment for a relatively long time, and future proofing is one way to give customers confidence in their purchases.
Forward verification is also relevant with regards to how data or information is stored and recorded. The film, for example, has a major flaw in that it can hardly be future-proofed in any sense of the term. Celluloid is notoriously flammable, and hundreds of original films have been lost to studio fires; celluloid also decomposes in a relatively short time and takes on the consistency of a jelly. Digital means of data storage are typically designed to avoid this type of physical degradation, but they are also intended to be relevant in the future. Future proofing of data archiving means that the physical medium should be durable and the format in which the data is saved should remain readable well into the future.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
