The rate at which we're creating, storing and needing to access data is growing by at least 40% a year. Much of that's down to the increased use of high-definition images and video, as well as data coming from the Internet of Things and user-generated content. Even the world's largest businesses are struggling to meet the challenge of taking in, storing and securing that much data.
As with so many business challenges today, cloud computing will play a prominent role. Centralising your digital media assets into a cloud-based archiving and search platform can help you to:- access all your data from anywhere at any time, at speed. You don't have to worry which server it's sitting on, at which site, and whether accessing it will have an impact on colleagues' work. You can also take advantage of effective indexing and retrieval solutions, including using machine learning to automatically understand the content of images and video.
- improve the security of your data, with fine-grained control over who can access each item, and encryption of your data both when it's being stored and while it's in transit.
- create a robust disaster recovery strategy, by taking advantage of the cloud provider's own replication, backup and disaster recovery processes. If there's a disk failure in the cloud, you'll probably never know. If you lose access to a local copy of your data, you can easily access the backup in the cloud in seconds.
- reduce the cost of storage, especially object storage for unstructured data, even as you improve access and security, and simplify archiving and disaster recovery.
In short, using cloud-based storage lets you focus on creating and making use of digital content, and getting more value out of it, rather than worrying about infrastructure issues.
That's certainly the case for one of our customers, a sport's governing body. It created a video archive that lets the national team search for TV coverage of opponents, so it can analyse how they play. Built using the Google Cloud Platform, the system captures 400,000 videos per season and can deliver relevant content to tablets or PCs anywhere in the world. The insights provided by the archive are crucial to the team's success.
For more information about how you can use cloud-based storage, why not come and talk to your