While storage independence is paramount, being able to quickly and easily access the elasticity of the cloud provides great flexibility. Cloud storage offers IT teams the ability to spin up the storage they need, immediately and without ever setting foot in the office. So, for a company that must quickly implement a remote work environment, tools that make it easy to work with cloud storage from any provider, if and when they need it, are essential.

The starting point for any cloud workflow is to get the assets into cloud storage and complement that with a reliable interface that can be accessed from anywhere. Once the files are uploaded, this interface then provides a familiar mechanism for managing those files and making them accessible to authorized users regardless of where they are located.

Today, thousands of media organizations design advanced workflows in this way, by leveraging technology based around a SaaS along with cloud storage making these deployments as reliable, fast and seamless as possible. Having remote access to your storage in a secure, fast and reliable way while retaining control over where that file is going and to whom, is invaluable to remote workflows. That’s the advantage of a well-architected SaaS platform. Not only can users access the files they need but operations can administer from anywhere, adding and deleting users and reporting on activity at a moment’s notice.

With this type of interface delivered from the cloud, users enjoy less installation time and fewer maintenance hassles. Cloud-based systems typically include APIs so systems can be easily connected together as part of more complex workflows. Another benefit is the elasticity of the cloud to store as much or as little content as required for each production team.

Choosing The Right Storage Strategy

In addition to the cloud, assets could also be stored on-premise or in a hybrid approach with a mix of on-prem and cloud—with both tied seamlessly together to give the user a single interface with which to access content files. The assets media professionals work with are extremely valuable, so being able to confidently control where that content is being stored and how it is accessed is a major part of making remote access strategies work.

While some file sharing tools force businesses to use proprietary storage, other solutions, offer storage independence that allow organizations to decide whether their files will live in the cloud, on-prem, or across a hybrid storage architecture. The latter is the most common. More importantly, those valuable assets should always be in the owner’s storage, wherever that might be, and under the company’s full control. Because remote team members and trusted partners need access from many different locations at all different times, storage independence becomes a key element of security and control. Authorized team members can find assets in multiple locations, depending upon the demands of the project at hand.

The choice of storage location is another critical part of any workflow. One strategy might make sense for one production company while a different one is deployed by another. What they share is the need to get files into and out of the cloud in the most reliable way. This is where an easy-to-use interface delivered via an auto-scaling cloud-native SaaS becomes invaluable. Not only does it help reduce IT connection costs, but it also gives the user complete control and quality assurance during the transfer process.

Maintaining Control Over The Entire Workflow

By maximizing the choice of where to store content, users are more in control of their content and its position in the supply chain—with the ability to handle more files, more efficiently. File acceleration plus choice of storage location helps make production teams more nimble, more adaptable, and more empowered. This new-found agility allows media companies to access best of breed services across any cloud infrastructure, public or private.

For international production and post-production companies with teams and partners located around the world, streamlining the file transfer process puts them in a better position to manage this distributed infrastructure and efficiently access media assets across locations and public cloud providers. At the end of the day, what production teams need most is a storage abstraction strategy that gives them the flexibility to work the way they want to, whenever they need to.

With modern challenges, media professionals need advanced solutions for their storage and cloud services, with immediate availability for employees and customers alike. This collaboration ensures teams can work remotely and serve the organization’s myriad and diverse client base securely, all while remaining flexible on the job. In addition to user access, automation is also a key consideration. For example, with international workflows a “follow-the-sun” model, where vital content automatically moves from team to team, synchronized to the time zones of all those who need to receive it, is an approach many take to help with tight deadlines. In these workflows, moving content at the end of a workday between locations automatically or into and out of public cloud storage on a pre-defined schedule, can help ensure all teams are productive no matter what time zone they are in.

Connecting To The Cloud

With any accelerated file transfer to the cloud from your desktop, special software is required at both ends of the chain. While the user should be able to access the interface from a standard browser, a piece of acceleration software runs behind the scenes on their desktop to deliver the content to multi-tenant software running in the cloud (AWS, Google, Microsoft). This allows for both an accelerated transfer of files of any size as well as helps ensure reliability in case of a network interruption. Businesses can also run a piece of acceleration software within their on-premise data center to facilitate automated transfers from on-prem storage to the cloud at precisely scheduled times.

So, for media companies that must quickly implement a remote work environment, tools that make it easy to work with cloud storage from any provider are essential. For many looking to build a remote infrastructure, cloud storage has become an invaluable resource.

Challenging Times

Due to the pandemic, media businesses have turned to file acceleration to make working remotely more efficient and productive. Professionals working in the Media & Entertainment industry need to be able to work quickly and nimbly. What we’ve all learned is that taking your work home with you is challenging. When you’re dealing with terabytes of content, you can’t just take that home with you.

While storage independence is paramount, quickly and easily accessing the elasticity of the cloud provides even greater flexibility, resulting in seamless and reliable workflows for people working from literally anywhere in the world.

The industry isn’t showing signs of going back to where we were before. It’s now focusing on shoring up those remote workflows, making them more permanent and scalable, by turning to enterprise-grade SaaS solutions that can adapt quickly as business demands evolve. As we all look to navigate challenging times, remote access to cloud-based storage is here to stay.