The perfect cloud storage solution for corporate media environments
Object Matrix has been implementing MatrixStore object storage into highly regulated environments for over 20 years. The technology has been built with security, audit, and regulatory compliance at its core.
Many corporations such as banks, insurance, mining, research, life science, and utility companies have media, post-production, or audiovisual (AV) departments. Such teams handle internal communications, training, investor relations, monitoring, or more commonly these days, control bringing content production back in-house.
As there is no ‘corporate video editing application’, the media departments turn to the best in breed solutions from the creative video world (Adobe, Avid, etc.) to get the job done. Much like broadcast and post-production facilities around the globe, corporate organisations also use creative tools to capture, edit, share, present, and archive video content. They also need workflows to be integrated, tested, and proven.
Corporate organisations typically face external regulatory scrutiny, so the nearline and archive platforms they use usually require ‘bank-level security capability that adheres to the highest levels of Digital Content Governance (DCG).
MatrixStore is a media-focused object storage platform that can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud. It is tightly integrated into video workflows with full built-in DCG capabilities and is proven in highly regulated environments.
Pain Point |
Solution |
|---|---|
| Need to share video content produced internally with the corporate team. | MatrixStore object storage and Vision, the web-based content browser, enables you to share content from any location with internal and external teams. |
| Constantly being asked to find and share content. | MatrixStore object storage and the intuitive Vision application enable authorised teams and/or individuals to self-serve content freeing up the AV/post-production teams to get on with other more meaningful tasks. |
| We need a storage platform that works with creative workflows but that meets our own internal audit and regulations around data protection and retention. | MatrixStore object storage is integrated with leading creative applications and vendors. It also comes with full Digital Content Governance to ensure you can implement business rules in accordance with internal or external regulations. |
| Our IT vendors do not understand our video workflows or the challenges we face. | Object Matrix has been dedicated to video workflows for well over a decade. We understand both your production challenges and regulatory challenges, generalist suppliers never will! |
Some of the customers we’ve helped
“Object Matrix has worked with us for over 7 years to not only ensure our content is always available and protected in accordance with our internal corporate policies but also to help our workflows evolve as our business needs evolve.”
Object Matrix continues to grow in the video industry as we are only focused on the video industry.
MatrixStore object storage is completely horizontal and could service any industry, but back in 2009 we decided to focus on a niche, and the video was that niche.
From ingest and nearline to archive and distribution we have delivered multiple benefits to national broadcasters (News, Sports, Entertainment), post facilities, production houses, VFX, colouring and finishing shops, content delivery networks, VOD providers, content creators, and global content distributors. With systems ranging from 88 terabytes to hundreds of petabytes, no organisation creating, curating or distributing video content is too big or too small to benefit from MatrixStore object storage.
Typical Workflows
Ingest
Protect and archive your rushes (dailies) before you start to work on them or receive content in a secure DMZ from file acceleration technologies
Nearline
2nd tier storage for backup, transformation (transcode), QC etc.
Parking
Park content in Avid workflows on a secure platform when you need to free up space on production storage
Re-purpose
Easy access to shows and archives taking the hassle out of localisation and promos
Collaboration
Enables secure local and global collaboration with internal and external teams
Archive
Put your entire archive at your disposal with little or no administrative effort. No more LTO migration or putting creative professionals into holding patterns for content to arrive
Distribution
VoD (Video on Demand) and OTT needs a secure and scalable repository for current and archive content
What are the benefits to working with Object Matrix?
- Enables creative staff to self-serve access to content from anywhere, ensuring they can do more with the content you own
- Increases operational efficiencies reducing time spent managing media
- Enables you to work from anywhere, bridging the gap between talent and content
- Provides a fantastic return on investment (ROI), not only saving money through increased efficiency and productivity but also enabling new opportunities to generate more content
- Enables global collaboration and empowers creativity
- Non-proprietary formats ensure your content and metadata is portable and future proof meaning no more vendor lock-in
- Digital Content Governance and cyber attack prevention ensures your assets and your customer’s content are protected at the highest levels possible
- Limits disruption with built-in disaster recovery and business continuity meaning work continues should outages occur
Any organisation that creates, curates, processes, or manages video content is aware that ensuring that content is protected, authentic, and is accessible from anywhere, with a full audit trail, is a complex challenge to stay on top of. That is where Digital Content Governance (DCG) comes in.
Riding the Deluge of Unstructured Content
The main problem with the deluge of content and huge file sizes (4K & 8K media) is that it requires different skill sets and toolsets to manage, and naturally a lot more storage space. Without the right structures and processes in place, it is all too easy to misplace content you have previously created, which very often leads to content producers having to reshoot footage, often at great expense.
Couple that with the fact that innovation in the media industry has happened at such a fast pace, and it is no wonder that it is challenging for media companies to keep their staff skills up-to-date. Only a handful of years ago engineers were managing physical tapes, so the move to a file-based world and IP is quite a difference.
In this new world of media production and delivery, one of the biggest mistakes made by media companies is the lack of integration, automation, and governance. They very often treat disk the same way they handle tape – with manual processes. This both causes bottlenecks and introduces errors into the workflow. It also means that media companies are wasting valuable resources on managing storage rather than more beneficial functions. The result is, more often than not, a number of un-secure, un-managed storage silos, made up of everything from scalable NAS and USB Drives to large cloud buckets full of content they cannot find nor afford to use.
Digital Content Governance
If organisations wish to profit from their content or build a successful community they need their hands on their data 24/7 to use, re-use, re-shape and re-use. Digital Content Governance platforms enable that, but they also focus on the whole package required to protect, curate, share, distribute and audit digital content.
Ultimately it is about ensuring a number of crucial factors:
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Maximising value
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Easy search
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Ensuring content is authentic
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Protecting data
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Business continuity
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Future-proofing content and metadata
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Access controls
Want to learn more about the 7 crucial factors?
We dive right into the nitty gritty of DCG and the vital elements required. Take a look at our Digital Content Governance Datasheet to find out all there is to know on the subject.
With Security in Mind, How Can You Better Protect Your Data?
On-demand workflows and the ability for creative professionals to self-serve content from anywhere means that it is not possible, nor recommended, to have data disconnected from the rest of the organisation in siloed networks or on tapes on shelves. They weren’t that good anyway. Fires have burned down many an archive.
However, things are getting tougher. Too much cyber-crime has been paid, and the recent cyber attacks will only make criminals and malicious individuals more targeted in the way they attack. You have a lot of wealth in your data. That data is vulnerable.
MatrixStore was built from the inside out with data security in mind. It provides a great number of benefits over SAN/NAS/scale-out file systems. If you take digital asset security seriously but don’t want to spend your time managing complex cryptography, firewalls, and data policies, then you’ll appreciate that the storage is pre-configured with those core benefits and that individual storage pools of assets automatically have a high level of security applied.
All this comes built into a nearline storage platform that is integrated directly into many workflows. From securing content at ingest to providing best-of-breed digital preservation throughout and beyond the production process.
Benefits
- Access to MatrixStore is always via an API with a strong user authentication model
- Vaults of data can be made immutable – this can completely protect data from being changed by ransomware attacks, or from being accidentally or maliciously deleted
- This low-level immutability means that many ransomware strategies that bypass gateways (e.g., by loading up in firmware) are protected from because the ransomware never has access to the O/S
- User actions audited – even asset reads can be audited
- Servers are heavily firewalled and can even be hosted on the web
- Data transfer can be made with encrypted protocols and therefore becomes non- sniffable and non-spoofable
- Individual vaults/buckets can have their own admin user
- Unlike complex solutions with multiple software packages and because MatrixStore is cohesive, upgrades of one part of the infrastructure will not accidentally leave security holes in another part
How to Keep Your Data Safe
- Avoid having access to large swathes of data from a single PC / login. It is a major security hole.
- Think about your backup, disaster recovery, and replication strategies with the hackers in mind. The hackers will compromise a PC at some point. What could a determined hacker do from there?
- Think about keeping data safe in purpose-built storage that adheres to good Digital Content Governance principles. Exposing everything via a filesystem is extremely dangerous. Consider on-premises object storage for this. Get into the mind of the hacker when forming your digital content governance strategy.
Normally at this point, it is common to say “don’t worry but attacks are rare and you are unlikely to be a victim of crime.”
They aren’t rare. You will be attacked. Don’t be a victim.
Want to learn more about keeping your data safe?
Take a look at our Data Security datasheet to find out more!
