Cloud-Based Services are Changing the Face of the Media
In the media industry information changes at a rapid pace. Breaking news and hot stories are delivered to readers at lightning speeds. So media agencies need to implement agile business solutions that can scale quickly. Sensing the potential of cloud computing technology, media agencies are rapidly moving to the cloud, using new cloud-based services.
How does the cloud benefit media agencies?
Media encompasses a wide range of information services including: journalists, reporters, editors, advertising agencies, print material, audio/video and online content, and much more. Media is another important industry, after IT and video gaming, which requires automatic scaling features.
For instance: a popular newspaper publishes a breaking story. If the story goes viral, the news website starts receiving huge traffic within minutes. Similarly, media agencies receive sudden traffic when they publish a lucrative advertisement. People start bombarding the site to take advantage of that exciting offer. There have been several instances where websites have crashed due to such an overload. It is not feasible for media agencies to set up huge resources to handle sudden traffic surges.
When the media website is hosted on the cloud, resources are automatically scaled up during peak traffic hours. At the same time, resources are automatically scaled down to accommodate slower traffic trends. GMO Cloud calls this the high availability feature where the cloud becomes reliable, possesses fault tolerance characteristics and performs automatic scaling. At the end of the day, media agencies pay for only the resources used.
Faster performance
Another benefit of cloud-based services is faster performance. Consider the same instance where a media agency has published a breaking story. As soon as traffic surges, the performance of the site goes down. But with a cloud solution, when traffic surges the resources are scaled up. At the same time, the performance of the website does not change at all. You can still enjoy faster performance and 99.9% uptime. Broadcasters and visual art agencies can publish rich audio/video streaming.
Business process integration
Media agencies need a greater level of collaboration among their employees. When there is a breaking story, the reporter needs to report it to the agency. The publisher has to create the story and the editor must next finalize the content. When the story is about to get published, there might be additional incidents that need to be added. The head office may need to collaborate with many regional offices to incorporate these changes. Cloud-based services integrate business processes to provide access to every employee involved in that business process. By providing quick access to the required data, cloud technology allows employees the flexibility to dynamically update news and improve the performance of the agency. In addition, the increased use of smartphones allows media agencies to create mobile solutions that boost the SLAs of the company.
Cloud computing concerns
The major concern for media people to move to the cloud is data integrity. News agencies deal with critical information that requires higher levels of confidentiality. Data security is crucial. However, cloud-based services offer secure, resilient, and scalable data management solutions. When every industry is benefiting from the cloud, why should the media lag behind? It is important that the media industry join the cloud to stay ahead of competition.
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About the Guest Author:
Kaushik Das is an engineer, research analyst and a technical writer in the areas wireless, IT, enterprise software, next-generation hosting, storage and renewable energy. He specializes in competitive analysis, market research, industry insights, white paper and actionable web content development.
