HITS

Cloud services have become increasingly important tools for developers and IT professionals to be productive, and Microsoft Azure has become a major player in the sector by offering a growing collection of integrated cloud services.

Those services include analytics, computing, databases, mobile, networking, storage and the Web – all of which help Azure’s growing list of clients to move faster, achieve more and save money.

The Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) recently discussed Microsoft Azure’s strategies with Joel Sloss, senior program manager. Asked what makes Microsoft Azure stand out against other cloud services, especially in the media and entertainment (M&E) space, he pointed out that cloud services are ecosystems that are made up of not only offerings from content service providers, but also partners and independent software vendors, developers, processes, policies and operations extending from the enterprise to the device to the cloud.

“Microsoft is the only cloud provider in the world that can offer a comprehensive solution that spans platform, infrastructure, and software services whether they are in your corporate datacenter, on your mobile device, or in our worldwide environment,” Sloss said.

Microsoft Azure is also the industry leader in security, privacy, and compliance investments to protect customer data, he said, explaining that Azure “holds more certifications and complies with more standards than any other public cloud — period.” Therefore, he said: “Media customers can trust that Microsoft is committed to protecting their intellectual property, no matter if it’s streaming over the wire to a user’s phone or resting in cold storage.”

Security, in particular, often comes up as a concern when it comes to using the cloud, and we asked Sloss how Microsoft Azure addresses those concerns. “Security is a top priority for Microsoft Azure, as evidenced by the numerous standards-based certifications held by the platform,” including the Content Delivery & Security Association’s Content Protection & Security standard, FACT and the MPAA assessment, he said. “Microsoft provides a tremendous amount of transparency when it comes to operations, privacy, and compliance — customers have control over and visibility into where their data resides,” he said.

Using cloud services to improve customer experiences is one major goal of Microsoft Azure clients. Sloss pointed to MEO — the TV, Internet, telephone and mobile “quadruple play” brand of Portugal Telecom — as an example. MEO wanted to improve the customer experience for its 1.4 million TV subscribers and increase sales of its on-demand content, he said, noting: “To achieve this aim, MEO is using Microsoft Azure services and Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite technologies to provide a new recommendations service that transforms content consumption data into meaningful insights that help customers more easily find relevant content that matches their viewing preferences.”

The adoption of cloud services for general IT practices, meanwhile, is well underway, he said. “But in the M&E space there is still a lot of trepidation regarding content security in the public cloud,” he told us.

Big data and analytics are currently “areas of significant investment for Azure, including hyperscale storage, machine learning, and visualization,” Sloss went on to tell us. “These extend from not only customer-side scenarios (analytics) but into how the platform itself is instrumented for security responsiveness and capacity planning,” he said, adding that, for media and entertainment, machine learning is used for services such as Indexer (Media Analytics), which recognizes speech and provides content identification.

The future of the cloud will be in providing secure environments for the many workflows comprising media processing, management, and storage, Sloss said, adding: “The growth in 4K/UHD media and the emergence of 8K are going to push content owners out of their own data centers as they search for more capacity, while the compute-power needs” of virtual reality and augmented reality, as well as immersive audio/video development, “will be well beyond reasonable” IT investment strategies.

He concluded: “The move has already started. The only remaining question is where you want to go.”