Why businesses are turning to the cloud for media management

Despite it being more than a decade since the concept of ‘cloud-computing’ was first introduced, businesses are only just beginning to embrace this technology. Concerns about privacy, security and potential data leaks have slowed the rate of adoption, but that’s beginning to change as businesses begin to realise cloud’s benefits. Consequently, it is becoming an essential part of modern-day business infrastructure with 42 per cent of UK businesses using some form of cloud service. Its use is becoming particularly prevalent within the world of media management as organisations get to grips with the critical role cloud plays in managing, storing and sharing content. As businesses contend with the growing demand for video and new forms of digital content, cloud will play an increasingly important role.

Resolving legacy issues

Prior to modern cloud infrastructure, video presented an awkward paradox – large, cumbersome files that, once edited, needed to be delivered seamlessly and in as close to real-time as possible. This was extremely challenging – and often impossible. Even large media organisations struggled to deploy competent internal management tools. Terabytes of video files were dumped into existing local storage which usually resulted in a lack of organisation and acute network congestion.

Then came the difficulty of serving the content, where a sudden string of viral video successes can rocket server demand from near zero to millions of concurrent users demanding multi-megabyte streams immediately. The adoption of cloud-based media management platforms means most of these logistical challenges can be quickly overcome.

Standards and security

Standards will always be a concern for enterprises, whether from an interoperability point of view or from a data security and privacy standpoint. Therefore, it is vital that transparent policies and underlying technical standards are in place for due diligence purposes. Video cloud solutions that comply with globally recognised standards, such as ISO 27001 and ISO 9001, have been instrumental in overcoming adoption barriers.

While data privacy and security expectations have also been significantly upgraded in Europe by the implementation of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the fact is that expectations around the handling of personal data have been on the rise for some time. Best practice safeguarding around video footage of children, for example, is no longer an option. It relies on effective tagging and referencing of content at a very granular level, a challenge that is significantly harder if it is not centrally enforced by robust and transparent policies. Creating and enforcing such guidelines is much easier in a centralised cloud environment than in a variety of workflows scattered across multiple jurisdictions.

It’s worth highlighting that using the cloud doesn’t automatically make data more secure or compliant. It’s actually the software being used in the cloud that the security pertains to. Cloud-based software security should be designed from the ground up with accessibility based on detailed hierarchies of permissions. For instance, when using a cloud-based content management platform, organisations can set specific permissions for each user, ensuring that the rights to view, download or edit content are assigned on a case by case basis. This ensures that content can only be accessed by the right people and it’s clear what permissions each user has and what they’ve done with the content. This helps businesses strike the right balance between security and accessibility.

In addition, sharing video content between globally-distributed internal departments is now a matter of forwarding a secure text link, not a multi-gigabyte folder. This means that businesses can quickly share content with employees no matter where they are in the world. Also, there is no chance of running out of storage space or delivery bandwidth in a cloud environment either, so the days of frantically phoning IT to spin up another server are long gone. – Read more