M+E Connections

There are numerous security and other advantages for media and entertainment companies to shift their workflows to the cloud, according to Microsoft Azure, Teradici, Nvidia and London-based visual effects and animation studio Jellyfish Pictures.

Today, using Azure, Jellyfish is able to “move data back and forth from on-premise to Azure automatically, based on the location of the request for the data,” Eoin Bailey, a Microsoft Azure software engineer, said May 30 during a webinar called “Secure Content Creation in the Cloud” on Brighttalk.com. Bailey noted he’s been working with Jellyfish for nearly four years.

But the main reason why a media company should select Azure, “first and foremost, is security,” he said, adding: “Security is priority zero for Microsoft. We employ more than 3,500 full-time security professionals and our Microsoft Cyber Defense Operations Center” monitors 6.5 trillion signals “from around the globe every single day, and we spend a billion dollars annually on cybersecurity.”

While cybersecurity represents “one of the foundations” of Azure, compliance is another key feature, he said, noting his company has more than 90 compliance certifications. Many businesses “just don’t have the capacity to manage the scale of security or compliance, so by choosing Azure, you’re gaining [these] benefits just out of the box,” he said.

Azure is also “hybrid by design,” so users “can deploy both on-premise and to Azure completely seamlessly and manage both of those deployments seamlessly,” he pointed out, noting the flexibility that offers companies. That’s “particularly important if you already have an investment in on-premise hardware and resources and you don’t want to throw that away,” he said. Companies that use Azure also gain global scale with a local presence, he pointed out.

Teradici Cloud Access Software, meanwhile, helps Jellyfish overcome the cloud latency challenge to put remote computing in the hands of creative professionals, according to the companies.

Advantages of using Teradici include the fact that its technology is “easy to deploy, it’s easy to manage and it’s very reliable,” according to Mirela Cunjalo, director of product management at Teradici.
Other key advantages are its ability to provide “ultra-secure remoting” capabilities and endpoint architecture, as well as its high-performance user experience, she said. With Teradici’s protocol, “data stays in the public cloud, stays in Azure, it stays in the data center, [and] we only send encrypted pixels to the client, to the end user,” she noted.

Jellyfish CTO Jeremy Smith explained how his company’s content workflows have migrated to the cloud. Artists are able to connect to remote workstations on Azure that are powered by Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) and Cloud Access Software to collaborate on projects with remote teams and securely access creative content from anywhere while maintaining high quality user experience, according to the companies. In the process, Jellyfish has been able to keep using the tools it already knew and loved while leveraging the power of Nvidia GPUs and cloud compute, storage and distribution, according to the companies.