Media files are the lifeblood of the Media & Entertainment industry. Whether a short promo or full-length feature film, their lifecycle often spans multiple cities, regions or even countries, and includes interacting with various people, software systems, storage types and network conditions. Today, most media companies also want to incorporate cloud services at one or more stages to aid with the storage and processing of increasingly large content files and formats.

From modeling, VFX/rendering and transcoding to video editing, post production and broadcasting, cloud services can be used to streamline and manage media workflows. However, many organizations contend with network latency, not only slowing down file movement between on-premises locations, but also inhibiting cloud connectivity and access to cloud services.

What is latency?

In the most general sense, latency is the time between stimulus and response in a system or the time it takes to travel from one point to another. Any system with moving objects, from impulses travelling on a nerve fiber and cars on a highway to data moving over the Internet, involves latency. Like most forms of travel, movement over the Internet is rarely a direct path, rather routing and switching overhead as well as the large numbers of round trips required by standard protocols to complete simple operations, compound network latency.

For most data transfers, distance between source and destination has a huge impact on transfer time. But calculating data transfer time involves more than just the total distance travelled; the size of files or data sets also impacts transfer time, as does bandwidth and the data transfer protocol being used.

Latency in Cloud Connectivity

When it comes to cloud data transfers, dealing with long distances is generally a necessary or even desired element. Companies that use cloud storage for Disaster Recovery (DR) will want to backup data in a non-local cloud data center in case the entire region is impacted by a natural disaster, for instance. Others simply want to find the best price for cloud services without having to consider location.

Most cloud data transfers utilize HTTP(S) and, like all standard Internet protocols, network latency slows down data transfer time when longer distances are involved. Especially if critical to business function or success, the time it takes to move large amounts of data or files to and from cloud services can be problematic.

Signiant Flight for Predictably Fast Cloud Transfers

While we can’t fold space-time, we can speed up cloud connectivity utilizing advanced IP technology such as Signiant Flight. Flight’s patented acceleration protocol and scale out architecture achieves unprecedented Multi-Gbps cloud transfer speeds. A unique SaaS solution, Flight is particularly useful when ingesting large files from multiple global endpoints or when data must travel over long distances. Flight can be used with AWS, Microsoft Azure or both, and customers have the flexibility to use any client-side software.

If you want to utilize cloud services for DR, media production, tiered storage, big data analytics, or any other case that involves large data sets or files, consider Flight for predictably fast cloud connectivity.