The Pandemic forced companies to make it possible for media production professionals to work from anywhere around the globe, enabling creators to edit and work on large projects and access the media files on demand. And while this shift to work-from-anywhere has created endless possibilities, it comes with additional cost and complexity. Accessing files in the new virtual work environment has become exceedingly complicated, time-consuming, and potentially expensive. The result: creative professionals are now at risk of sacrificing precious production hours, reverting to antiquated techniques and substandard workflows to retrieve files in a more costly manner.
For instance, post-production creatives require a clear understanding of the costs associated with cloud migration. Whether ingesting to the cloud or extracting assets from the cloud, production companies need a tool that provides accurate cost information to make more accurate, intelligent, and impactful business decisions.
The fact is—the cloud has evolved far past rudimentarily storing and archiving media—it’s now a place to work on assets in real-time. And though the cloud can be a highly effective media pipeline for transcoding, image recognition, speech-to-text, closed captioning, and more—placing assets in the cloud and having timely access to those assets is the challenge, especially when there are potentially significant data movement costs involved.
Unfortunately, due to the multitude of user types and varied projects, most post-production environments find it nearly impossible to calculate proper storage and cloud costs. Moreover, the ability to efficiently move data is the lifeblood of every modern business. Nevertheless, the inherent file size of modern production media often results in remote editors and production professionals struggling to access assets in the cloud quickly—significantly hindering workflow performance and speed-to-delivery for end products. This situation results in a compromise to retrieve or use proxy-based files. The bottom line? Leveraging the connectivity between on-prem and cloud infrastructure can result in the challenge of accelerated data movement and the costs associated with it.
So, why is data movement potentially expensive? The costs are all based on egress, access, and retrieval times. After all, the cloud Service Level Agreements (SLA) differ depending on your data’s storage tier. As a result, the speed or Cloud SLA at which you access or move your data translates directly to how much your cloud vendor charges you—the faster you want it, the more you pay. In short, you may be forced to spend much more of your budget to reduce production time.
Fortunately, modern, innovative solutions—purpose-built for the media and entertainment industry ensure creative professionals can standardize their file structures efficiently through remote media asset management tools or by project based workflows and insight into real-time migration analytics. Utilizing analytics and real-time insights to make informed decisions about when to migrate data to and from the cloud enables post-production creators to filter and locate data sets, select different storage tiers, estimate costs associated with each tier, and execute a “dry run” to provide an accurate cost estimate for the intended migration before moving a bye of data.
These modern solutions provide users with a comprehensive and easy-to-use data management application that is flexible enough to contend with the complexities of managing multiple storage targets wherever they are, enabling production companies to understand data value, storage costs, and time and expense associated with data movement.
By taking the steps mentioned above, production companies can reap the benefits of comprehensive remote access while minimizing the costs and risks associated with cloud migration.
