IABM Member Blog - Object Matrix - Introducing Digital Content Governance

This blog was written by Nicholas Pearce, Sales Director / Co-Founder Object Matrix & Co-Founder at Object Matrix. The blog was published on March 13 2017 and the original can be viewed here.

Organisations creating, curating and distributing content need to know the following:

Riding the Deluge of Unstructured Content Given the deluge of content, yup, deluge. Was going to use tsunami but then everyone uses that. A veritable deluge I tell you. And guess what:

This data is big. Thanks to the 0.005% of people being able to watch 4K content all content MUST be 4k! Storage industry folks are cool with that. Why stop there? Please sign my petition to raise funds and awareness of the importance of 16K content production: www.iWant16KButWatchMostlySD.com. Of course, people are not producing 4K content for fun of it as the process of doing so is pretty expensive. They are doing it because of demand (Netflix etc.) and also to ensure their content is ready for future distribution channels.

BIG DATA. I did that in shouty letters so you get the idea that it's big. Clever eh? Anyway, BIG DATA needs big storage.

Even medium sized post companies now deal in petabytes. Time to stop thinking a petabyte is big. It was. It isn't. You're in the multiple petabyte media business now.

Using the public cloud? Sometimes I cannot download a 36kb email from my public cloud account. Not so much the cloud provider not being available, but more the tiny, unreliable pipe. Try shoe-horning a million times that down the same connection.

Not all cloud storage solutions provide the same levels of reliability. If the platform is not well architected then simple changes, or minor administrative errors, can have major consequences. Public cloud is great when it is one part of a strategy, not when it is your only strategy

Most media companies sadly don't have the skills to manage that deluginous (new word) influx of content never mind the storage required. In fairness to the engineers, just 5 years ago they were managing physical tapes. Now it's a world of petabytes and whilst the storage has increased 5x, skilled in-house resources are on the wane.

Companies are creating silos of content that is easily disconnected from the metadata that describes it. Lose the metadata, lose the content. It's that simple and it's happening day in day out.

There is still very little integration and automation to enable businesses to benefit from workflow efficiencies. There is still a lot of treating disk like tape with manual processes causing bottlenecks and introducing errors into the workflow. Valuable resources (people) are wasting time managing storage instead of working on functions that might actually benefit the organisation.

The value in a company that creates or has created video content lies in that very content. If they cannot find it, if they do not have two or more copies they are screwed.

Any company working in media is effectively a data and talent management company. Lose either, lose revenue.

Revenue generating activities tend to slow down when you either lose your clients' data or content gets leaked early. What are they doing to cope? Simply put, many are struggling and that is not surprising given that content, until very recent adoption of IT based technology, was once distributed through largely manual processes. Organisations are simply doing the best they can with the skills and resources at their disposal. The amount of content spewing into their facilities directly correlates to the amount of un-managed storage silos made up of everything from high end scalable NAS to USB Drives.

Security through obscurity is no way to protect content. Just because you can't find it does not make it secure Handing off this problem to another organisation is a very attractive proposition. Let Amazon deal with it. With this option available many are turning to the cloud fabric solutions only to find out that the sensible options are limited to the big public cloud providers where price is pretty much the only benefit they advertise. Whilst the race to the bottom continues to protect content the cost of getting data back can end up costing, well, a lot.

Many of these purchasing decisions were / are made in a tactical panic without taking into account the strategic vision of other stake holders in the business. The emergence of more focused, service based, offerings that satisfy the requirements of the whole business is encouraging. Niche services focused on what the media industry needs. How refreshing.

Niche services do not come risk free of course, whack a MAM and some cloud storage together and you have an offering for the media industry? Not sure it is that easy when taking care of an organisations assets. A question you should ask of any service, niche or public cloud: What are my exit options?

OK get to the point Pearce. What is DCG and how does it help? Digital Content Governance provides the technology platform that underpins the entire creative process. Whilst there are many API driven and integrated applications (rights management, workflow and metadata management etc.) that form a vital part of the ecosystem, DCG platforms are specifically focused on how to protect, curate, share, distribute and audit digital content:

Secure, scalable and future proof digital preservation platforms. Typically object storage platforms are best suited to provide the automation and integration, via APIs, to implement a Digital Content Governance platform

Find and share capability

Providing an audit trail during the lifetime of a piece of content

If organisations wish to profit from their content, build a successful community or better understand the costs of producing content they need their hands on their data, and metadata, 24/7 in order to interrogate, analyse, re-use, re-shape and sh

LINK:	http://www.theiabm.org/news/member-news/blogart4619...
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