Is Remote Working Putting Your Media at Risk?

Companies across the globe have had to adapt to this new world of ours at a rapid pace. The way we socialise, the way we shop, and of course, the way we work has changed overnight. With the world turned on its head, our homes have become our offices. As such, companies have been forced to take a leap of faith into the world of remote workflows and a surprising number have fallen victim to cybercrime.

Pirates and hackers have leapt on the chaos bestowed on society by the global pandemic. According to cloud-computing firm, Iomart, large-scale data breaches are up 273%; ransomware in which criminals encrypt files and demand a ransom to restore access is up 90%; and destructive attacks where data is destroyed is up by 102%.

A recent report from IBM suggests that the remote work impact will increase the cost of a data breach by a staggering $137,000. 70% of organisations that required remote work due to COVID-19 said it would increase the cost of a data breach and 76% of those organisations said it would increase the time to identify and contain that data breach.

The same report stated that misconfigured cloud servers was amongst the biggest cause of breaches, alongside stone or compromised credentials. According to IBM, breaches due to cloud misconfigurations resulted in the average cost of a breach increasing by more than half a million dollars to $4.41 million.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation has reported a five-fold increase in cyber-attacks. In April, some 450 active WHO email addresses and passwords were leaked online. Thankfully the data was not recent, but the attack did lead WHO to migrate affected systems to a more secure authentication system.

With cyber-attacks rife, it can be daunting for companies who have been forced into enabling remote workflows.

Leap of Faith

To many media companies, adopting cloud-based infrastructure may feel like a step (or shove) into the unknown. The luxury of taking a measured, planned approach towards adopting remote workflows has been compromised due to the global climate. With the need to rapidly adapt to changing circumstances, organisations may be forced to neglect considerations into the potential pitfalls of solutions before rolling out a cloud-based infrastructure. However, this quick fix thinking cannot replace a comprehensive contingency plan. This quick fix thinking could put your most prized assets at risk; your premium video content. How can media companies ensure that remote working doesn't mean security has to suffer?

Pitfalls, pitfalls, pitfalls.

A lack of risk assessment can have serious implications for content security. By neglecting the basic act of weighing-up and comparing various workflows, prized content may be there for the taking for hackers and pirates. The most frightening thing is, very often media companies are unaware that their content is at risk until it is gone. Without careful assessment, the industry runs the risk of diving head-first into new challenges that could have been easily avoided. The advice is simple: take action before disaster strikes.

Unfortunately for family company Larson Studios, this lesson was learnt the hard way back in 2017. Upon being cornered by a group of hackers, it had to wire $50,000 in order to keep its clients' content secure. But the word of a pirate means little, and subsequently its clients most valuable assets were still leaked over the internet. 10 episodes of the highly acclaimed Orange is the New Black were released a month before they were due. This instance aptly illustrates the urgent need to consider security in remote workflows.

Thankfully, there are ways to protect content if media companies take the time to seek them out.

When considering which remote workflow to adopt it is important to know that there is no one size fits all solution. Consideration of your company's needs, coupled with knowledge of different cloud structures and what they can offer, will go a long way to ensuring the correct solution is selected.

Option, A), B) or C) or D)?

Public Cloud: is accessible by multiple parties, business and consumers alike. Its strength is that content can easily be accessed by all. Its weakness is that its content can easily be accessed by all.

Private Cloud: is a storage service that can be hosted on-premises, from a private data centre or from multi-tenanted service.

Hybrid Cloud: is a solution that spans two cloud solutions, but unlike multi-cloud, the term is used when the two cloud solutions are being used for different tiers of storage.

The bottom line is, relying on any one solution is always open to abuse if the solution isn't the one that suits you. Broadcasters need to tailor their solutions. Enter option D:

Multi Cloud: is a combination of several cloud services in order to provide access to more connected services, to provide higher protection against data loss, to provide higher levels of security and to have less dependency of any one external organisation. However, whereas the term hybrid cloud is typically used to provide separate tiers of storage, multi-cloud is primarily to provide these service redundancies.

Security Options

Knowing the four very basic types of cloud infrastructure is but the tip of the iceberg. The use of encryption at-rest to deny access to unauthorized users, third party watermarking which traces content use, anti-screen grabbing technology, real-time activity audits are a few in a long list of potential security measures media companies should have in place to protect their video content.

This information may sound terrifying, that's because it is. But fortunately, it doesn't need to be, nor does adopting remote workflows need to be a leap of faith. Object Matrix and Fortium will be coming together in a webinar in order to help you consider ways in which to secure your valued con

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