Cloud Computing in the Media Industry: The Possible Gains and Risks
The turn of the millennium saw media companies change their content format from analog to digital for easy storage, transmission and upgrade. The amount of digital archives in the media industry increased, bringing immense pressure on media companies to devise appropriate mechanisms to protect, store, and update their digital archives. Similarly, the recent hike in the demand for media products and services has forced media companies to rethink the way they serve their insatiable customers. Unprecedented demand for online videos, news, reports, commentaries have tasked media outlets with the huge responsibility of fulfilling customer requests within the shortest time possible.
“Media cloud” has therefore been quite instrumental in helping companies respond to customer demands in a faster and properly-coordinated manner. Traditionally, customers could not have access to media products until sometime after they had been produced. Today, with the adoption of cloud technology, media companies can deliver their digital content as soon as it is made. This gives the media companies a huge advantage of marketing their digital products/services faster than before.
Media cloud offers bigger capacity for digital content as well as maintaining it in archives for long periods so that customers can easily access it anytime, anywhere. This practice of increased exposure of ocntent for as long as possible has helped some companies achieve higher profitability through increase in sales and revenues. Customers can also receive the latest flow of information in real time owing to flexible and scalable cloud computing, which ensures media products can be updated without delay.
Since media companies won’t be bogged down with huge cost of hiring IT personnel, maintaining inventory and spending recurrent capital on IT software and hardware, many find cloud computing expressly cheap and stable. Media cloud encourages optimal use of technologies and improves asset utilization for reducing the time media products and services are made available to the market.
However, the are two concerns: security and performance doubts. Some media companies that are reluctant to move their in-house IT infrastructure to the cloud often cite security risks as a deterrent. Exposing content archives to subscribers whose activities they cannot control may lead to unauthorized duplication and copyright fraud. Similarly, there is a grave concern about how media cloud shutdown may affect the performance of operations.
But as the issues of security and performance are practically dealt with, the number of media companies adopting cloud will increase. No success-oriented company wants to overlook the cost efficiency, speed of product and service delivery, and potential for business innovation that media cloud promises.
Expectedly, security is a main concern. That is why GMO Cloud prioritized this factor and has come up with a multi-level security strategy. Furthermore, GMO Cloud has a high resiliency in data flow – this means that it provides a fast and reliable network connectivity. For more details, you may visit the specifications page of this site.
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About the Guest Author:
Jerry Olasakinju, a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) degree holder, is a passionate researcher and writer whose interest in everything computing is unparalleled. He blogs about his literary works at http://jerryolasakinju.blogspot.jp/
