The universe of cloud computing is
borderless. Fusing the private and public cloud together can offer the best of
both worlds in terms of security and scalability, as well as the agility to innovate
quickly when your business expands. Lara Tan discovers more.
Contrary
to popular belief, original content is not the panacea to winning the streaming
wars. Instead, one should focus at successful streaming services that use the
scalability of the cloud to provide a glitch-free user experience.
Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) companies that
leveraged the cloud to achieve digital transformation have reported rapid
growth and great improvement in efficiencies, according to an Ernst & Young
announcement in 2019.
Netflix, an international leading streaming provider, was struck
with a data centre failure in 2008; as the cloud offers petabytes of storage
space for high-quality content and monolith volume of consumer data, the
fast-growing company has since migrated its traditional infrastructure to the cloud.
EY advisers believe that the cloud paradigm will help transform TMT
companies by greatly accelerating their ability to roll out new products, gauge
their customers’ responses and make rapid-fire adjustments.
To achieve operational efficiency and scale rapidly in an affordable
manner, many enterprises are choosing a hybrid-cloud approach that integrates
on-premise infrastructure with cloud-resources. Dan Murray, director marketing
at Telestream, explains: “The hybrid-cloud step is a natural combination of
using existing on-premise investments and operations process while leveraging
the benefits of cloud technologies where appropriate.
“Streaming
multi-screen encoding, multi-language captions, personalised advertising,
delivery networks, digital rights management, quality monitoring and content
archives represent opportunities for cloud technologies.”
For instance, in 2018, FOX Sports leveraged on Telestream’s
Lightspeed Live over cloud network during the remote production and broadcast
of the World Cup in America – effectively spinning up the workflows on demand.
According to Deloitte’s 2020 Technology Industry
Outlook, hybrid-cloud serves as an interim step in
the digital transformation process of the TMT sector. However, Ignatius Wong,
director of Product Management (Hybrid IT & Cloud) from CenturyLink
offers a different perspective: “Increasingly, we are seeing media operators
adopt hybrid-cloud as part of their IT strategy.
“Their business is primarily in content distribution, broadcasting
and media streaming which has relatively high-performance and low-latency
requirements.
“We do not see it as an interim approach, rather it will be the
industry practice for media operators as digital businesses that have different
application workloads that will have to be housed in either a
private cloud or public cloud, depending on their requirements.”
CenturyLink, a global technology company, provides media operators
worldwide with secure, high-performance cloud and data centre
connections to turn up new cloud-based applications and services in real
time, thereby allowing a hyper-scalable user experience and acceleration of the
digital transformation process.
Wong added: “Through a hybrid-cloud approach, media operators
would be able to leverage the economics and scalability of
public clouds and also on private clouds for geographical
locations with low latency requirements; they can site a
private cloud instance to store and process mission critical content
with zero latency requirements at strategic edge locations.”
In the past, content delivery is impacted by the distance between
geographies and congested Multiprotocol Label Switching Lines (MPLS). However,
broadcasters today can achieve a smooth transmission with proper deployment of
the hybrid-cloud.
Chin Woon Lee, product director of Epsilon, points out the
foundation of a successful cloud deployment: “For global media operators with
business processes and content delivery enabled by cloud architectures,
ensuring good network functionality is an equally important step in the digital
transformation process to avoid serious challenges like packet loss and latency
issues.”
“Media operators must therefore consider how they interconnect data
centres and public clouds over the networks.
“To do so effectively requires flexible and scalable bandwidth capacity to support high traffic volume between their data centres and public clouds.
“Paying attention to the quality of network infrastructure is
critical for media operators looking to optimally and securely deliver content
to end-users, especially across geographical locations.”
Indeed, hybrid-cloud technologies can become the key digital enabler
for broadcasters to achieve zero-latency transmission between geographies and
networks.
Despite the purported benefits of a cloud-enabled enterprise,
security remains the top concern for 66% of IT professionals in the TMT sector,
according to EY’s observations in 2019. The concerns are not unfounded as one
in four organisations have experienced data theft from the public cloud and one
in five organisations have experienced an advanced attack against its public
cloud infrastructure, according to a recent study conducted by McAfee.
Gauri Bajaj, director of Managed Security Services of Tata
Communications, highlights that the desired level of control and reliability on
public, private or hybrid cloud would impact the security provided by the cloud
provider.
Bajaj suggests: “Compared with public cloud solutions, private
clouds give enterprises a lot more control over all applications, complete
visibility over where data resides, as well as the liberty to implement
controls over the entire cloud estate depending on changing business demands.
“While a private cloud platform hosted in the local market is part
of the solution to ensure data sovereignty and regulatory compliance,
enterprises with global operations should choose a private cloud that gives
them additional flexibility through a granular data centre approach, which
enables
them to store their data in multiple different geographies.”
Furthermore, edge computing provides advanced security to broadcasters and content providers. CenturyLink’s Wong explains: “Traditional cloud architectures are very centralised which makes it vulnerable to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and power outages.
“With edge computing, processing, storage, and applications are
distributed across devices and data centres which makes it difficult for any
single disruption to take down the network.”
Apart from improved security, Masstech told APB+ that edge computing allows
broadcasters
access valuable media assets securely; thus enabling remote video and audio
editing as well as other forms of media collaborations.
“The time is right for companies to seriously consider exploring the
advantages – including reduced latency and lower bandwidth costs – of
processing data locally, at the edge of their networks,” stated
Paul Sallomi, global technology, media, and telecommunications industry leader and US global
technology sector leader, in the Deloitte report.
Wong concludes: “We believe that for companies to deliver
applications faster they will require three key components integrated with
their IT strategy:
n hybrid-cloud with the right
application in the right cloud environment;
n multi-cloud management to
seamlessly manage applications across multiple clouds; and
n secure global connections to enable
secure dynamic network connectivity.
“This
will allow them to increase their speed to market, while giving visibility into
governance, compliance and cost control.”
As the media industry switches to a direct-to-consumer model, glitch-free content has become pivotal in determining the success of a streaming provider. To scale and secure a clout in the streaming war, content providers must adapt to evolving needs and leverage cloud technologies.