Outages can cause loss of ad revenue, declining viewership and reputational damage that can be difficult to repair.
Maintaining an uninterrupted service has always been a crucial requirement for broadcasters, and when operating in a highly competitive environment, service continuity is more important than ever. Outages can cause loss of ad revenue, declining viewership and reputational damage that can be difficult to repair. Viewers are unforgiving, and given that there is endless choice these days, an inopportune service interruption can cause viewers to turn off or over. Broadcasters therefore need to have robust systems in place to prevent outages, no matter the cause, whether cyberattack, equipment malfunction or infrastructure failure.
Of course, needing security mechanisms and disaster recovery systems in place to ensure services stay on air is nothing new – service continuity has long been a requirement for broadcasters. Rather, what has changed is that broadcasters can now use cloud-based infrastructure for all or some parts of their workflows, such as the playout operation, enabling a different approach to security and DR.
Revolutionising Disaster Recovery
In traditional broadcast workflows, DR requires a full, always-on back-up system ready to kick in at any moment. This is costly because it requires duplicate hardware, physical space, highly educated employees and continuous monitoring and testing. Cloud, on the other hand, eliminates this complexity because it provides high availability and redundancy. Critical data, services and systems can be mirrored across multiple servers or locations, and cloud services offer automatic failover mechanisms to achieve redundancy and high availability. This eliminates the need for broadcasters to maintain expensive back-up hardware, reducing costs while enhancing reliability.
When integrating cloud playout into DR strategies, the operational load on broadcasters is also reduced because the burden of maintaining availability is shifted to the cloud provider.
Protecting Broadcast Operations in the Cloud
Cyberattacks on media services can take many forms, including data breaches, denial of service attacks and ransomware. Cybersecurity is obviously a top priority whether systems are based in the cloud or on-premises, because without the proper security mechanisms a broadcaster’s entire operation could be effectively held hostage.
While it may seem intuitive that cloud-based broadcast systems are particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks because they are reliant on external infrastructure, this is actually not the case. Cloud systems are extremely secure because of the advanced technology, rigorous security protocols and continuous monitoring that cloud providers offer. Cloud-based security tools mitigate ever-changing risks and threats and ensure that systems are continuously operating with the highest security standards, something which is challenging to replicate on-premises.
Takeaways
Integrating cloud playout into disaster recovery strategies has a number of advantages over using a traditional hardware-based playout system for disaster recovery. In the event of a service interruption, a cloud playout system can quickly be called into action, and broadcasters benefit from reduced capital expenditure costs as well as high availability, redundancy and advanced security measures. Keeping broadcast operations safe and having an effective disaster recovery system are mission-critical for broadcasters, and integrating cloud playout into disaster recovery strategies can help them achieve that aim, keeping both viewers and advertisers happy.
Lelde Ardava is Sales and Account Manager at Veset.
