Moving a MAM into the Cloud vs Building it in the Cloud

If you want your business to maintain a competitive edge, you’ve probably started incorporating processes that live in the cloud. Every industry has seen a bevy of services that help build cloud environments specific to that industry’s needs, but just because these services work in the cloud does not mean they are created equal.

The Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry, in particular, is unique with its very large file sizes, highly secure assets, and multi-versioning. It has several other requirements, such as assured delivery on deadline, that fall in the sweet spot of cloud computing's potential. However, many media management platforms on the market predate the cloud, which poses an interesting question: is it better to migrate existing services into the cloud or create a new, cloud-native workflow altogether?

Many M&E vendors have taken a “lift and shift” cloud migration approach to stay relevant. That means that while they work in the cloud, they are not cloud-native, and that could prevent your workflows from running at full speed and at scale.

As time goes on, that technical deficit will widen, putting a real dent in your ability to adopt modern methodologies and tools into your workflow. It will also hinder your ability to collaborate with partners and deliver your content and products with efficiencies that your customers expect and competitors offer. Critically, cloud-hosted solutions migrated from legacy on-premise platforms generally have much higher overall costs, as well as longer deployment, configuration, and maintenance times than cloud-native solutions.

Cloud-native solutions provide significant advantages over legacy solutions that have been ported into cloud-hosted environments, several of which are especially relevant to media and entertainment businesses. Here we’ve highlighted the differences at a glance.

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	Cloud Native	Cloud Hosted
Elastic compute	Compute capacity on demand – seamlessly scale capacity; pay only for what you need and use. Eliminates the need to make large, expensive hardware purchases. Reduces the need to forecast traffic, and help users immediately address changes in requirements or workload spikes	Usually dependent on manual action and human resources, generally with limited ability to scale. Slow reaction to workload changes.
Resilience	Self-healing and highly available microservice connections ensure that failure of single service instances don't create catastrophic workflow failures.	Failures of single processes usually require manual intervention to launch a new compute/host instance and re-establish API connections to the new host.
Security	Microservices limit attack vectors to single service surface areas. Ability to leverage cloud service provider advanced multi-layer/holistic security features and controls that are continuously evolving with emerging workload patterns.	Virtual Machines, OS-hosted processes and middleware can expose security vulnerabilities to the entire solution if those are not managed correctly and on time by highly specialized professionals.
Deployment / Implementation	Cloud-native applications provide consistency and speed, allowing developers to package dependencies with containers or serverless architecture. New environments can be cloned/terraformed in minutes and ready to configure immediately. Significantly reduced implementation times provide immediate ROI.	Deployments usually require custom terraform, server-level installation routines and manual configuration over hours/days.
Breakthrough technical innovations, including AI/ML	Serverless direct access to cutting edge cloud-native services provide significant competitive business advantages to M&E, including the monetization of older library content and new digital service offerings.	Available through manual configuration, scripting and/or API wrappers with sometimes limited capabilities and/or reporting, slowing down reactivity to technological and consumers changes.
New pricing models	Usage-based pricing enabled by avoiding unnecessary hosting/OS direct and indirect costs	Usage-pricing available with higher fixed costs and specialized resources usually required to support heavier infrastructure needs.

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Cloud-native Cloud-hosted Elastic compute‍

Compute capacity on demand – seamlessly scale capacity up, paying only for what you need and use. Eliminates the need to make large and expensive hardware purchases, reduces the need to forecast traffic, and enables users to immediately deal with changes in requirements or spikes in workload.Usually dependent on manual action and human resources, generally with limited ability to scale. Slow reaction to changes in workloads.

‍Resilience

‍Self-healing and highly available microservice connections ensure that failure of single service instances do not create catastrophic workflow failuresFailures of single processes usually require manual intervention to launch a new compute/host instance and re-establish API connections to the new host

‍Security

‍Microservices limit attack vectors to single service surface areas. Ability to leverage cloud service provider advanced multi-layer/holistic security features and controls that are continuously evolving with emerging workload patterns.Virtual Machines, OS-hosted processes and middleware can expose security vulnerabilities to the entire solution if those are not managed correctly and on time by highly specialized professionalsDeployment /

Implementation

‍Cloud-native applications provide consistency and speed, allowing developers to package dependencies with containers or serverless architecture. New environments can be cloned/terraformed in minutes and ready to configure immediately. Implementation times are significantly reduced, providing immediate ROIDeployments usually require custom terraform, server-level installation routines and manual configuration over hours/days

‍Breakthrough technical innovations, including AI/ML

‍Serverless direct access to cutting edge cloud-native services provide significant competitive business advantages to M&E, including the monetization of older library content and new digital service offerings.Available through manual configuration, scripting and/or API wrappers with sometimes limited capabilities and/or reporting, slowing down reactivity to technological and consumers changesNew pricing modelsUsage-based pricing enabled by avoiding unnecessary hosting/OS direct and indirect costsUsage-pricing available with higher fixed costs and specialized resources usually required to support heavier infrastructure requirements

As you consider investments in new platforms to manage your media supply chain, it is important to arm yourself with the correct information on their capabilities in the cloud. This is a decision that should be well-informed, as it comes with many long-term implications. Be sure to ask whether your vendors are cloud-hosted or cloud-native, because that could make all the difference in your company’s long-term health. Cloud-native solutions are more adaptable, cost-effective, and technologically advanced than legacy solutions, especially when it comes to M&E functions.

If you’re considering an approach to media management that positions your business as far forward as possible, get in touch with us.