Increased demand in a time of remote working.
As people around the world spend more time in their homes to help stop the spread of COVID-19, the amount of digital content they consume has skyrocketed. For my company, base, that has led to a significantly increased reliance on our platform to help media companies work remotely. Since 2015, we have provided media companies with centralised cloud storage integrated with media software tools online and on-demand—a business model that has special appeal now that many people must collaborate online.
Supporting remote work
When lockdowns began in the UK, some of our customers had very little time to shift from working together in a common space with high-speed internet access to working remotely with varying levels of technology and connectivity. Suddenly, they were using our platform at record levels.
Fortunately, base’s multicloud platform is supported by IBM Cloud Services. Our solutions leverage IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers on the IBM public cloud, as well as Aspera and IBM Cloud Object Storage. This provides our customers with reliable access to their important files and the ability to transfer files quickly for various editing and production tasks.
How our customers are coping
One of our long-standing customers, Little Dot Studios (LDS), creates content for social media networks. When stay-at-home orders were issued, Little Dot had 48 hours to set up more than 80 employees to work from home. Fortunately, LDS had been working in partnership with us toward a cloud-first infrastructure, and they were able to implement it quickly. Our IBM Cloud solution managed the surge in activity flawlessly.
Another of our UK customers is the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which began preparing for the pandemic in advance, as soon as it became international news, which meant that we helped them move much of their editorial work to the cloud before the lockdown began. The first phase of the project was to quickly set up all systems in the cloud and back up the project data that was required immediately. We got them ready for remote access over a weekend. Today, BBC are using base for key parts of their essential news editorial work, incorporating backup storage, file sharing, and remote editing with BeBop.
A third example of how base is helping customers prosper during this difficult time comes directly from Taylor Made Media:
“When we needed to implement a remote post-production workflow at short notice, we reached out to Ben at base, who got us set up immediately. Because we had a large amount of material to transfer in a very short space of time, the team at base arranged for a drive to be sent out to us to make the initial upload process as quick as possible. As soon as everything was online, we were given a tutorial on how to navigate and operate the system, which gave us a clear insight into how we would use the service. Within a couple days of first contacting base, we were completely set up for remote working and our team of editors and freelancers were happily sharing footage and collaborating on multiple projects. It has made our transition from entirely office-based to entirely remote-based working pretty much seamless, allowing us to pick up from our homes on the Monday almost exactly where we had left off in the office on the Friday.”
