Two of the most important trends for 2021 will be the need to archive digital content for the long term and, with no end in sight for the pandemic, the continuing need to access archived content remotely.
Long-term digital content archiving
The huge volumes of valuable digital content that the media industry creates every year are works of art — cultural artifacts and shared human memories that have immense emotional and economic value. The challenges of managing, storing and protecting this data over the coming years and decades will be a major consideration for media professionals in 2021.
Today, the most cost-effective solutions for archiving content use high-capacity tape robotic libraries in local, cloud and remote locations. Addressing modern archiving challenges of the future will require advanced, easily-scalable, air-gapped tape architectures that can support erasure coding, geo-spreading with exascale capacities, extreme reliability and ironclad cyber-security protection. It will also require intelligent active archive software with metadata capabilities so that it can intelligently move and classify content.
Accessing archived content remotely
With the pandemic putting a brake on new film and TV productions, creative teams need simple ways to access, update and reuse all of this older archived content. Media companies are adjusting by moving the application to where the content is instead of moving huge amounts of video data around. In 2021, technologies that offer remote production and editing capabilities with secure, virtual workspaces to handle graphics-intensive applications will be critical.
Remote desktop technology will continue to be widely adopted for dispersed teams to seamlessly maintain creative workflows with access to their workstations and applications from their home studios. This is especially valuable when moving everything to the cloud isn’t feasible, yet remote teams need ongoing access to shared assets to complete projects and meet deadlines.
For creatives, it’s crucial to first store then easily access and share content for their projects. To help make this happen, storage infrastructure will be a key component in their workflows. With remote desktop technologies, organizations can use their existing storage ecosystem to streamline remote video workflows without interrupting the storage infrastructure. The content can then be securely stored for the long term, and accessed as needed.
While 2021 will likely continue to bring many of the same challenges that we’ve seen in 2020, the combination of long-term digital archiving and remote production technology will help media companies and creative teams to successfully navigate these challenging times.
Eric Bassier is Senior Director of Product Marketing at Quantum (www.quantum.com), based in San Jose, CA.