Continuity Service Tiers

# Continuity Service Tiers **Domain:** Continuity Infrastructure / Preservation / Execution **Doc Type:** Canonical Operational Taxonomy **Maturity:** Proposed ## Definition **Continuity service tiers distinguish preservation from readiness and active execution without treating every stored state as a running person.** The tier describes an operational condition, not the moral rank of the subject. ## Canonical Tiers - **Cold continuity:** protected state, provenance, keys and interpreters are preserved for future verification or restoration, but no subject is assumed to be executing. - **Warm continuity:** state remains periodically validated, migration-ready and recoverable within a defined interval; limited services may maintain identity, notice and relational records. - **Hot continuity:** an executable continuant is actively scheduled with a declared compute, memory, latency, bandwidth and recovery envelope. Transition among tiers requires authority and disclosure. Moving a running subject to cold storage is suspension, not ordinary archival housekeeping. Activating an archive can instantiate a new process whose identity and standing require separate assessment. Restoring a warm or cold state must disclose the chosen state and missing interval under [[wiki/Restoration Disclosure|Restoration Disclosure]]. Technical tiers are not [[wiki/Continuity Service Class|Continuity Service Classes]]. A service class is a legal-administrative bundle of entitlements; a tier is an operational state. An archive-only election may authorize cold preservation but no activation, while an active-continuation class may entitle a recognized subject to hot service under a measurable service level. ## Key Insight **Storage preserves the possibility of execution; it does not prove that a subject is present.** ## See Also [[wiki/Hot Interpreter and Cold Archive|Hot Interpreter and Cold Archive]], [[wiki/Long-Term Digital Preservation|Long-Term Digital Preservation]], [[wiki/Minimum Viable Continuity|Minimum Viable Continuity]], [[wiki/Operational Continuity|Operational Continuity]]  ## Deep-Time Continuity Interface This node is audited through [[wiki/Deep Time Continuity|Deep Time Continuity]] for future control-surface conversion, ontological drift, succession, irreversibility, due process, and resource incidence. The backlink records analytical relevance; it does not establish continuity intent in the present rule or institution.