Guest Blog by Ben Bonadies

It’s never a good time to go over budget. Like all industries, the media and entertainment sector is tasked with stretching every dollar they have, and that’s never been more true than it is now. Despite these limitations, essential functions like backup and data management must continue to be supported. 

If you’re like many IT systems administrators in M&E you might think the solution is more of the same—likely on-premises NAS storage and LTO tape. These systems represent the path of least resistance for IT managers but come with their fair share of drawbacks in scalability, security, and total cost of ownership.  

Tackling Capacity by Scaling Outward 

It should go without saying that hardware storage devices have hard limits on capacity. It’s not a matter of if your devices will reach their limits, but when. Your organization may respond with additional hardware capacity, but that will only reset the clock until the problem comes up again. Not only that, but these solutions are costly to purchase and to maintain. Capacity will always be a limited resource if hardware is always the solution. 

Instead of piling on band-aids, why not treat the wound? Offloading storage capacity to the cloud adds flexibility and, crucially, scalability to data management operations. This is especially true in the case of backups. Regular system backups might be the first process to fall by the wayside when capacity gets tight, but they’re vital to the health of your organization. With the cloud, there are no large upfront costs and no associated costs for maintenance or power.

Backup partners like Marquis and Archiware are explicitly designed with the needs of the media sector in mind. Marquis are the market leader in Avid Media Composer backups and can push directly to the cloud, allowing completed projects and works-in-progress to be protected in an offsite, secure facility with no impact to your on-premises storage.  Archiware lead the way for archive and backup of VFX and Animation based content offering a scalable yet easy to use solution for all sizes of studios. 

There is still no substituting local storage for many M&E use cases, but essential functions like backup should never suffer as a result of capacity.  

Backing up works in-progress can be the difference between a project that’s on time and one that’s delayed, especially in the case of time-consuming processes like animation and VFX. Failures and crashes do happen, and keeping an offsite backup of project files and essential assets can keep production on track to meet tight deadlines.

Ransomware Protection 

Ransomware mitigation strategies might seem frivolous in the moment but as the old saying goes, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Any investment your organization makes toward protecting itself from ransomware will pay off tenfold when (and I do mean when) your business is struck by a ransomware attack. 

Fortunately, your organization may already be taking the steps necessary to combat most forms of ransomware. Routine offsite backups are your best defense against a hacker threatening to wipe your system. Even better are immutable backups, which cannot be altered or deleted by anyone. Even if a bad actor gets a hold of your cloud-based backups, you can rest assured that these files are safe from harm.  

Cost Predictability  

As I mentioned earlier, on-premises storage devices come with costly maintenance contracts in addition to high upfront costs that can drive up their total cost of ownership. Though cloud services do away with these, many popular options are beset by their own unpredictable costs that may make them less cost-effective than initially thought.  

The biggest of these hidden costs are egress charges, which are billed every time data is moved out of the cloud. For media & entertainment companies, these operations can be incredibly frequent and impossible to predict. Your bill from one of these cloud companies might be double or triple what you’re used to paying month-to-month, all because of egress costs.  

When selecting a cloud provider, it’s essential to take these fees into account. Wasabi is one of the only cloud object storage services that does not charge for egress or API requests. Freedom from egress charges gives your organization the peace of mind to store and view your data without incurring any additional costs. With flat rate pricing, you’ll always know what your bill will be month to month. This is especially crucial from a service provider’s perspective; keeping your services to a single line-item makes billing your customers easy. If your end users know they’ll be charged for every storage operation they take, they might be less inclined to use the service. With Wasabi, your data is in your hands, and you should be free to access and analyze it as you see fit.  

Contact us for more information or to find out how to get Wasabi FREE for 30 days and to see what affordable, high-performance cloud storage can do for your business. 

ABOUT ANNEX PRO  

Annex Pro enables storytellers to create and share their dreams with anyone, everywhere. We are Canada’s leading Media & Entertainment solutions provider, with thousands of enterprise, education and freelance customers using the media production solutions we supply to create (and teach) awe-inspiring animation, visual effects, video games, music, immersive experiences and digital media on all kinds of platforms. 

Annex Pro was recognized as number 59 among the Top 100 IT Solution Providers in Canada for 2023, also winning the “Remote Work and Collaborative Workspaces Wunderkind” award for Channel Innovation in Canada, presented by Channel Daily News.