Enabling the M&E industry via Cloud Computing: Preethi Menon

Authored by Preethi Menon – Vice President and Head, Practices, Clover Infotech

Preethi heads the Practices at Clover Infotech. She brings along a consultative approach to offer niche solutions to our customers in the areas of Enterprise Applications, Digital and Portal Technologies, Big Data and Analytics, Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence, and Infrastructure solutions on Cloud.

The Indian Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry is a sunrise sector for the economy. The industry has been largely driven by increasing digitization and higher internet usage over the last decade. Internet has provided access to numerous online and on-demand entertainment platforms for people across the globe. The high penetration of mobile phones and affordable internet rates has changed the content consumption behavior of the audience, globally. It is estimated that this year, global consumers will spend an average of 67 minutes a day watching online content. It’s a significant increase from the last year, which was 56 minutes, according to Zenith’s Online Video Forecasts 2018. These figures show the demand of digital content consumption, which is driving M&E companies to generate more content or data for consumption every minute.

The breach of data from a media and entertainment company – be it video content, banking information or any other vital intellectual property – can severely undermine an organization’s reputation and revenues, and ultimately even destroy a company. This makes the vital user data highly confidential in nature and hence requires advanced security solutions.

Off-late, a lot of data breach instances have hit the industry. For example, Sony Pictures hacked in December 2014, almost 200 gigabytes (GB) of data was stolen. This data was inclusive of employees’ personal information, official emails, salaries and copies of then unreleased Sony films. In 2017, HBO was on the receiving end of a cyber-attack, which resulted in the theft of proprietary information, including some upcoming projects.

Amidst of all these disruptions, cloud computing has emerged as a viable option for storage, security and performance concerns of the industry. Cloud enables remote content storage in a connected environment addressing the storage issues as well as increasing the availability and reach of the content. Cloud also helps in repurposing content on varied devices, thereby improving content delivery across all mediums – computers, tablets, mobile phones, etc.

Furthermore, cloud enables analysis of vast amount of data, ongoing service innovation through agile development, scalability to handle increase in workload and faster service delivery. Cloud security provides multiple levels of control in a network infrastructure to afford continuity and protection. One can opt for private, public or hybrid cloud for heightened security control.

Let’s look at few security benefits that cloud offers:

Protection against Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS) – DDoS attacks have affected a lot of renowned players in the media and entertainment industry. A DDos attack leaves a website nonfunctional for days or even months, which adversely affects a brand’s identity and image. Cloud computing provides intensified security against such attacks.

Data Security – Technology advancements have increased the digital footprints of consumers. It is the responsibility of service provider to guard the data of its consumers. Cloud computing offers great security, as the data is stored in the system, it can be easily accessed even if something happens to your computer. You can even remotely wipe out data from the lost machines for avoiding it getting in the wrong hands.

Providing constant support – Web assets of a media and entertainment company are always functional, whether they are a suite of applications or a website.  A security solution that provides constant support, including live monitoring, is becoming a business necessity. Constant support is needed to enhance the delivery of website content as well as application functionality on a global scale.

Flexibility - A media and entertainment company faces increased traffic during a certain time, for instance if they are airing Cricket World Cup or Olympics. Cloud gives you the flexibility to enhance or scale down capacity. You have the flexibility to avoid server crashes during high traffic periods by scaling up your cloud solution. When the traffic is moderate, you can scale back down to reduce costs.

In conclusion, cloud computing has definitely been a big enabler for the media and entertainment industry and it will continue to help the industry to reinvent their business models, provide high quality digital content, deliver improved performances and enhance viewer’s overall experience.

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