
Cloud computing is something increasingly central to all our lives-whether it's storage for our holiday snaps or online accounting at the office. When it comes to business, for multinational corporates, SMEs and even freelance individuals, the benefits are tangible, from cost savings and flexibility, to increased agility and scalability.
One of the main attractions of migration is throwing away those cumbersome servers and outsourcing that requirement. By reducing the need to invest in physical hardware, there's the potential to save a lot of money and make your operation leaner. But what about the benefits for the creative industries? Can the adoption of this technology improve productivity and creativity? Does it have advantages beyond those it offers the traditional private or public sector?
Here's a fact to put it into perspective: Cloud adoption in the public and private sector is growing and, according to the Rightscale 2016 State of the Cloud report, hybrid cloud adoption is on the rise, companies are moving more and more workloads into the cloud, and security is no longer the main challenge. In fact, according to the report, private cloud adoption increased from 63 percent in 2015 to 77 percent in 2016 with hybrid adoption jumping from 58 percent to 71 percent in the same period.
So what does this mean for industries like design, gaming and VFX that haven't quite yet taken the steps towards wider cloud adoption? Will the same benefits apply to the creative industries? The short answer is: yes. What's more, creative industries possibly have more to gain given the types and scale of projects that are worked on.
Creative industries have to do more with less. Increasingly, artists, creatives and designers are tasked with bigger, more complex projects, more iterations and variants, and much tighter deadlines.
It is here, in this fast-paced environment, that cloud can perhaps be of most value.
Where are the benefits?
In the broadcast, media and entertainment sectors, cloud computing has seen widespread adoption for content delivery over the last few years with the rise of platforms like Netflix and Spotify. And while its impact in media production is less widespread, it is making inroads.
One of the most obvious examples is rendering. In a typical post-production facility, local, static infrastructure is used to render vast amounts of material. Demand, however, is rarely consistent or predictable and, as a result, technology is often under-utilized. In the same vein, when postproduction houses are extremely busy, they don't have the resources to meet demand.
Here, cloud can step in and provide a new way to operate. By moving rendering to the cloud, or extending in-house resources to include cloud capacity, post houses are able to provision the computing power as and when it is needed. This enables smaller facilities to be more ambitious and bid on larger jobs, previously outside their reach - an undoubtedly democratizing situation.
This mix of resources is the basis of a hybrid IT environment, which according to Gartner, is the result of combining internal and external services, usually from a combination of internal and public clouds, in support of various business outcomes.
Beyond this move to use cloud to optimize resources, where else can it be used? And what other problems can it solve in the creative industries?
The wider scope of cloud
One of the major benefits of cloud computing is that it makes an organization more agile and better positioned to react to changing market environments. This occurs in a number of ways-from having more money to invest in new ventures, to being able to get products and services to market sooner. In the creative sector-be it gaming, VFX or design-cloud can be used to great effect in areas such as better data management, rapid iteration, boosting collaboration and improving security.
Security
This area was historically the major hindrance to wider uptake of cloud. As the saying goes, Cloud is just someone else's computer. Now, for the first time, according to Rightscale, lack of skills has surpassed security concerns as the top cloud challenge. The creative industries can, therefore, benefit from the experience of other industries when it comes to cloud adoption and better understand the issues-both real and perceived-around migrating workflows.
Of course following a number of high-profile breaches reported in the media, security will remain a question at the top of the agenda. However, given that human error has been found to account for, or contribute to, the majority of data breaches, there are ways to mitigate the risk, including user education, encryption and rights access. This-coupled with the facts that cloud software is better patched (so less vulnerable), that companies have clear visibility on their security practice and attack surface and that public cloud providers like AWS have dedicated teams of security engineers-means that just like with other industries, security need not be an obstacle. Taking all of this into account, moving to the cloud may even mean organizations become more secure.
Data management
As the broadcast, media and entertainment world moves into the realm of 4K, 8K and beyond, the amount of data involved is increasing exponentially. With vast datasets required to produce a television show or film, it becomes cumbersome to move that content around. Cloud can be used to centralize this data, enabling optimization, organization and distribution from a single location. It also means artists from anywhere in the world can access it, work on it and collaborate with one another in a virtualized studio environment.
The human element
Centralization of data helps bring artists together and promotes new ways to collaborate, such as running multi-user sessions, providing supe
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
02/05/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
01/05/2026
January 5 2026, 18:30 (PST) NBCUniversal's Peacock to Be First Streamer to ...
01/04/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/04/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/04/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/04/2026
Victoria Mon t Brings the Multi-Hyphenate Mindset to Career Jam 2026 The Grammy-winning singer, songwriter, and producer shared how versatility and self-inves...
01/04/2026
January 4 2026, 18:00 (PST) DOLBY AND DOUYIN EMPOWER THE NEXT GENERATON OF CREATORS WITH DOLBY VISION
Douyin Users Can Now Create And Share Videos With Stun...
31/03/2026
MeyerPro delivered the LED production for the Microsoft Ignite 2025 keynote at Chase Center in San Francisco, using more than 2,700 ROE Visual panels across mul...
31/03/2026
The Media Coding Industry Forum (MC-IF) is expanding membership outreach in 2026...
31/03/2026
ViewLift and MyOutdoorTV (MOTV) have announced the launch of ViewLift Conversational AI Search on the MyOutdoorTV platform. The feature enables natural language...
31/03/2026
The Atlanta Braves and Gray Media have announced a multi-year agreement to simul...
31/03/2026
Gravity Media has delivered broadcast services for TAB Golden Slipper Day at Rosehill Gardens on March 21 and will now cover The Star Championships at Royal Ran...
31/03/2026
Synamedia has announced that Mileto Tecnologia, a Brazilian pay-TV operator, has selected the Synamedia Go platform for its OTT expansion. Mileto is also deploy...
31/03/2026
KMH Integration will attend NAB Show in Las Vegas with a focus on what the company calls AV Casting - an approach built on the idea that professional AV and bro...
31/03/2026
Prime Video will carry live coverage of the first and second rounds of the 2026 Masters Tournament, beginning at 1:00 p.m. ET on Thursday, April 9 and Friday, A...
31/03/2026
The NHL and its U.S. and Canadian broadcast partners have announced a collaborat...
31/03/2026
Daktronics has partnered with Wake Forest to manufacture and install a new end z...
31/03/2026
The National Football League has announced that Las Vegas will host Super Bowl LXIII in 2029 at Allegiant Stadium. The announcement was made at the NFL Annual M...
31/03/2026
The NFL has announced a partnership with TMRW Sports to develop and operate a professional flag football league for women and men. The league will launch with i...
31/03/2026
Sennheiser's Spectera wideband bidirectional wireless system was used by bot...
31/03/2026
Sports Studio Inc., the company behind Free Live Sports, has announced the formation of an Advisory Board with five media and technology executives.
Each of o...
31/03/2026
PSSI and Appear have announced a new phase in their collaboration, with PSSI deploying Appear's X Platform to upgrade its mobile fleet and PSSI Internationa...
31/03/2026
As sports media organization continue to seek out new ways to streamline their p...
31/03/2026
With two new expansion teams and viewership/attendance on the rise, the league's production/broadcast arm and its partner NEP Connected Solutions are busier...
31/03/2026
Spotify has evolved from a streaming platform to an interactive, multiformat eco...
31/03/2026
Lastest New Universal Synthesizer System module announced
Make Noise Music have recently announced the launch of the latest addition to their New Universal ...
31/03/2026
True Stereo DynIR Engine, Virtual Load Shaper & more
Two notes Audio Engineering's Captor X reactive load box and cabinet simulator has built up a solid...
31/03/2026
By Kiera Williams
Every year, a new group of emerging media and entertainment professionals steps into the HPA community - curious, talented, and ready to grow...
31/03/2026
MELBOURNE, Fla., March 31, 2026 - L3Harris Technologies (NYSE: LHX) will release its first quarter 2026 financial results before the market opens on Thursday, A...
31/03/2026
Photo courtesy of NASA. An illustration shows NASA's Perseverance rover operating on the surface of Mars....
31/03/2026
L3Harris Technologies and Comtech Telecommunications Corp. have collaborated to introduce the next evolution in resilient multi-orbit capability for today's...
31/03/2026
Rebel Sport leads ad investment as brands compete for a large, active and qualit...
31/03/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
31/03/2026
CueScript, a leading international developer of professional teleprompting solutions, is enhancing its platform with three innovations that elevate flexibility,...
31/03/2026
#GALSNGEAR will host a series of meetups, panel discussions, and networking events during the 2026 NAB Show, taking place April 18 22 in Las Vegas.
The organi...
31/03/2026
At the 2026 NAB Show (April 19-22, Las Vegas Convention Center, Booth #N1328), Imagine Communications is introducing AI assisted scheduling capabilities within ...
31/03/2026
High-density upgrade for mobile fleet and PSSI International Teleport gives PSSI more flexibility for premium live event coverage
PSSI and Appear today announc...
31/03/2026
Solid State Logic Enhances Virtualized System T Platform to Deliver Scalable Clo...
31/03/2026
OWC to Showcase Storage, Workflow Acceleration, and Reliability Solutions for Cr...
31/03/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
31/03/2026
OpenDrives, a leader in software-defined video and rich media storage management solutions, will demonstrate several new innovations at the 2026 NAB Show in Apr...
31/03/2026
At the 2026 NAB Show, SDVI will demonstrate how its Rally media supply chain management platform continues to give media operations teams the tools they need to...
31/03/2026
Boland Communications today announced that at the 2026 NAB Show, it will introduce its new QD4K315HDR10, a 31.5-inch QD-OLED monitor delivering exceptional colo...
31/03/2026
Dr. Paul Tapper, CEO of NUGEN Audio, will lead an essential industry discussion at the 2026 NAB Show, examining whether dialog intelligibility is poised to beco...
31/03/2026
BCNEXXT will use NAB 2026 to focus on how broadcasters can turn today's operational and market pressures into opportunity. Meeting with customers in the IAB...
31/03/2026
Mediagenix, a global leader in smart content solutions to profitably connect the right content to the right audience, will showcase its latest innovations at th...
31/03/2026
DHD announces that AI-based audio noise reduction is now available as a powerful new option for its XD3 IP Core. Developed in cooperation with ai-coustics, audi...
31/03/2026
PTZOptics will showcase its vision for intelligent video and advanced camera automation at NAB Show 2026 (#N1902). Through immersive demonstrations and technolo...