There has been a sea change in our industry. Broadcast and media companies from production to post, corporate to theatrical, have adopted new applications to increase efficiency, whether it is asset management, versioning workflows, traffic or project management. Recent surveys of Media and Entertainment companies indicate that 95 per cent of respondents are now employing a cloud infrastructure. A hybrid solution is the preferred enterprise strategy with over 60 per cent adoption, while single system private deployments are less than five percent; meaning that we have begun to trust public cloud solutions for our critical media requirements – an important trend for us all.
The uncertainty of costs in public cloud instances have become less important, with executives preferring faster access, greater scalability, higher availability and quicker market responsiveness as the key drivers for adoption. It’s clear that hybrid cloud operation is perfect for our media facilities.
In hybrid solutions, the “bridge” products that marry the various cloud and on-premises systems together become a fundamental resource in managing success. Tedial’s Augmented STorage (AST) is unique in our industry in that it takes a mundane tool, hierarchical storage management, and expands it to provide a reliable and scalable conduit to interconnect multiple nodes of storage tiers across hybrid cloud deployments, effectively managing media movement and logistics behind the scenes. Using multiple cloud vendors in a seamless system is now possible, as well as marrying on-premises tiered storage to a wider archive in the cloud. Media movement is facilitated when needed, and managed for minimum transfer with maximum utility for end users. For multi-site operations AST transparently manages multiple locations of the same content, automating the data transfer across multiple sites and multiple cloud instances only when required.
By design, AST is highly resilient. Its architecture is based on nodes that can work autonomously in case of loss of connection with the central node(s), including content publishing, archiving and media processing to enable business continuity and local autonomy. AST nodes can scale up according to the storage management needs in a heterogeneous environment, starting small and growing according to customer requirements, and dynamically adapting to workload peaks. And, as you would expect, security and content protection is a fundamental consideration in AST’s design with authentication methodologies, group access levels and retention policies easily defined to protect content and limit access.
