HITS

In an industry that deals with complex supply chains, enormous files and increasing security challenges, there are multiple factors to consider when selecting the right tools for the unique challenges in the media and entertainment sector, according to Jon Finegold, chief marketing officer of intelligent file transfer software specialist Signiant.

“The amount of data that we’re moving to and from the cloud has grown massively over the last couple of years” and the COVID-19 pandemic was a “huge accelerator,” he said March 10 at the Smart Content Summit in Los Angeles, during the breakout session “Intelligent Cloud I/O: Lessons learned from moving petabytes to and from the cloud.”

During the session, he shared Signiant’s key learnings and considerations to help organizations make their journeys to the cloud successful.

Signiant has over 1 million end users on its platform now, connecting more than 50,000 businesses in more than 200 countries and territories, according to the company.

The company launched its first Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product, Media Shuttle, in 2012. Media Shuttle was initially only used to move content to and from on-premises storage using its own hybrid architecture, Finegold noted.

“Our cloud I/O journey really began in 2015,” when Signiant added the ability to move content in and out of Amazon Web Services (AWS) with Media Shuttle, he pointed out.

“At the time, media companies were starting to experiment with cloud storage but it was still early days in our industry. We saw adoption in 2015 with smaller companies and some enterprises and it grew steadily from there,” he recalled.

“Around 2017, we started to see more larger enterprises moving assets to the cloud and got some pull toward Microsoft and added Azure support to our platform,” he noted. “That’s when we began to see an early trend to multicloud.”

In 2019, Signiant saw demand growing for Google and so it added support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP), he said.

“Now we’re seeing a lot more activity in the multicloud area, where companies are starting to diversify some of their workloads using Google for certain things, Amazon for some and Microsoft for others,” he said, calling it an “interesting trend and one that we watch closely.”

Still, however, most companies are not moving all their assets to the cloud, “making the storage landscape even more complex, with some on-prem, some in the cloud and sometimes across clouds,” he pointed out.

The amount of cloud I/O on Signiant’s platform has grown 5x since 2019 and “today our software is moving petabytes into and out of the big three cloud providers every month and it’s still growing fast,” he told viewers.

On its cloud journey, Signiant has learned a lot, he noted. For one thing, there are a lot of tools today to move content to and from the cloud, including many that he said are offered by the cloud providers themselves.

There are also physical media options, dedicated connections provided by the cloud providers allowing organizations to “set up a direct connection between you and your data center and the cloud provider,” he pointed out.

There are a lot of developer tools, application programming interfaces (APIs), software development kits (SDKs) across many languages, command line tools and more that he said “give you lots of granularity for building your own solutions.”

There are, meanwhile, “lots of ways to do cloud I/O but, as we all know, media and entertainment has unique requirements and in our industry it’s never as simple as it seems,” he said.

He went on to point out the various considerations that organizations should be factoring into their decisions when selecting what tools to use, and discussed the various challenges involved with each of them.

Speed and reliability is the first thing to consider, he noted. After all, this is a “hair-on-fire” industry that is deadline-driven and speed is always a factor, he said. You also sometimes need to get content offsite at night to keep the network free during the day. There are also times your organization is creating so much content that it has to move that content off-site to free up local storage, he noted.

An organization, meanwhile, often has to get content off an outside broadcasting (OB) truck after live events and doing it quickly can save time and money, he said.

“Speed is a mission-critical consideration. And reliability is important too,” he told viewers, explaining how crucial it is to move assets with “byte-for-byte accuracy, making sure that there’s no compression or alteration of files as they move between on-prem and cloud, and between file and object storage…. If there is a network interruption, it’s important to ensure that things automatically restart and pick up where they left off.”

Meanwhile, the cloud providers all have huge bandwidth available but “we’ve observed high levels of congestion at certain times of day, which can lead to unpredictable performance using standard tools,” he said.

There are, fortunately, other options, he pointed out. S3 acceleration is offered by AWS, for example, he said, noting it helps minimize distance of the initial transfer but doesn’t deal with congestion so latency and packet loss “may still be an issue.” This option was also built for developers, he added.

One option for organizations to consider is Signiant, which offers fast, seamless and secure access to media assets, on any storage, anywhere, the company says.

The second consideration for organizations to make is visibility and alerts, Finegold said. Challenges there include: the need to know when a file has landed or if something went wrong; the need for visibility into current transfers to let partners know when content is expected to arrive; and chain of custody – who has accessed which files and when.

The third consideration is hybrid cloud vs. multicloud, he said, noting challenges include: Most media companies aren’t moving all assets to the cloud; it is important to remain “agile;” and the storage landscape is more complex than ever, he said.

He also cautioned organizations that “assets should always remain in your control so beware of solutions that move content into cloud storage that you don’t control.”

The fourth consideration is whether the solution is person-initiated vs. automated, he noted. Challenges include: People are always in the loop so solutions that allow for person-initiated cloud transfers and automated transfers are essential to most workflows; remote work initiatives; and the move to pull distribution workflows in which distribution partners can just pull down just the files they want when they want them, he explained.

The fifth consideration is administration, with challenges that he said include: operations teams needing to be able to add and remove users, control permissions, and easily onboard new partners.

The sixth consideration is partner content exchange in the cloud, with challenges including: working with more and more partners is the norm now; each partner may be on different cloud platforms; partners may change platforms at any time; and there is a cost impact, including paying for cloud resources in a partner exchange and how to manage that easily, he said.

Other considerations include multiple locations, frequency and utilization, and security, he added.

It is no longer a question of building one’s own solution vs. buying one but rather which size blocks to build with, he said to conclude the session.

To listen to the presentation, click here.

The 2022 Smart Content Summit event was held in conjunction with the EIDR Annual Participant Meeting (EIDR APM), and was presented by Whip Media. The event was produced by MESA, in association with the Smart Content Council and EIDR, with sponsorship by BeBanjo, Signiant, Qumulo, Adio, Alteon, Digital Nirvana, Slalom and Rightsline.