base Founder and Managing Director Ben Foakes sets out the facts about using the technology.
THE CLOUD IS ALL UP IN THE AIR
The cloud consists of large-scale IT infrastructure and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), hosted in physical data centres, that can be accessed via the internet and rented on a pay-as-you-go basis. When you upload a media file to a professional cloud service, it’s stored and processed inside a highly secure environment, with strict physical-access security in place. Data is distributed across multiple data centres or even multiple geographical regions, for additional data protection and service redundancy.
MEDIA STORED ONLINE ISN’T SECURE
As cloud providers, we have to build all our solutions with strict security. When you are dealing with business-critical assets, this cannot be achieved without a multi-layered security architecture. For the service we offer, users have the option to enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for logging into applications, bypassing traditional user names and passwords. Media file transfers are encrypted in transit. Data storage can be encrypted at rest and is automatically spread across three separate physical data centres in the UK.
FILES CAN BE TOO BIG FOR THE CLOUD
Today’s cloud services are hugely scalable and the media-focused SaaS solutions available for accelerated file transfer will support the high-speed upload and download of unlimited numbers, sizes and types of media files, to and from secure cloud storage platforms. We regularly see our clients transferring hundreds of terabytes and millions of video files in and out of cloud storage as part of their day-to-day operations, over standard internet connections.
YOU CAN’T CONTROL THE COSTS
When not managed correctly, public cloud services such as AWS, Google, Microsoft and others can be very expensive and hard to predict. The killer is storage egress fees (charges for pulling data from a cloud storage bucket). One of the ways base differs is we don’t charge our clients egress fees, retrieval fees or API call fees – and we maintain a flat per-terabyte pricing model for cloud storage. This is critical for the media industry, as unpredictable storage costs can make it difficult for companies to budget correctly. By choosing the right managed cloud services provider, or by building and managing your own cloud network, you can architect your cloud-based media solutions to bypass unpredictable fees and know exactly what to budget for, and when.
PHYSICAL MEDIA IS STILL NECESSARY
If your cloud storage architecture incorporates geo-redundancy and suitable levels of encryption and application security, there is arguably no need to maintain physical copies of your media. When you back up or archive media to hard drives or LTO tapes, you are taking more risk. Hard drives can fail if they are not in regular use, so sitting them on a shelf for long periods means you may lose your data. We are seeing an unprecedented shift to the cloud by media companies of all shapes and sizes, amounting to multiple petabytes of data storage, processing of millions of video files per month and multiple gigabits of global data traffic that would simply not be possible using traditional facilities. Cloud-native media solutions now provide cost-effective alternatives and a better, more flexible way of working than has previously been possible.
