A watershed moment for the cloud under COVID-19
Over the past few months, Signiant has put a great deal of effort into understanding the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced and impacted the global media industry. Whether speaking with a range of organizations about the process and challenge of transitioning to remote work environments or partnering with the DPP to track the short and long term effects that the conditions have had on strategy and morale, we’ve dedicated ourselves to creating a dynamic picture of our industry in hopes of finding out what comes next.
Recently, Signiant had the opportunity to continue that conversation, as our chief marketing officer Jon Finegold joined the Media and Entertainment Services Alliance’s (MESA) fourth annual M&E Day to discuss how the coronavirus has driven cloud adoption among M&E businesses, and what that might mean for the future of content.
Is this a watershed moment for the cloud?
As businesses realized the necessity of working remotely, Signiant’s Media Shuttle solution saw a massive increase in usage, a trend in part driven by CEO Margaret Craig’s decision to offer customers unlimited users up through the end of May at no additional cost. But it wasn’t just overall activity that caught Signiant’s attention. As mentioned in the presentation, the Signiant team saw data transferred to and from the cloud double from the spring of 2019.
In many ways this makes sense, the past few years have already demonstrated an increase in adoption of a hybrid cloud/multi-cloud storage strategy among media enterprises. The benefits of such an approach are manifold, combining the security of on-prem servers with the flexibility and elasticity that cloud services boast. Signiant, ever a believer in this approach, has striven to make it easier than ever for M&E businesses to transfer their content between different storage types, reinforcing our commitment to storage independence and ensuring that organizations are always in control of their assets, wherever and however they are stored. The transition to remote working across the board has only accelerated this trend, and it’s likely that we won’t be seeing it slow down anytime soon. This means that workflows will only become more demanding and more complex, with the need to move content from multiple different sources to create high-quality content while maintaining social distancing.
Dynamic solutions for uncertain times
As the outbreak threw our industry into chaos, it became increasingly clear that organizations would have to take major steps to evolve their production and distribution models. Rigid strategies that once felt like sure things became untenable, and the growing importance of adaptability came crashing to the fore. For many, the cloud offered an ideal solution, and user activity on Media Shuttle has helped us understand how user behavior has changed as a result of the circumstance. With share portals (shared access to remote storage) gaining major traction, Signiant has been offered a valuable glimpse into what’s working for those who have remained a float.
The more we learn, the more we hope to share. Above all we’ve seen that, while this has been a watershed moment for the cloud, it’s also been a watershed moment for an industry that refuses to take challenges lying down.
