One of the challenges in the media and entertainment industry is that it’s just not that easy to ‘take your work home with you’. And so, in 2020, when the world went remote, media businesses that were unable to quickly and easily empower their employees to work remotely found themselves at a disadvantage as they scrambled and struggled to keep content flowing. In 2021, media executives from across the industry continue to report that a key focus for their teams is to “shore up” their remote workflows to better prepare for whatever lies ahead.
This includes a significant review of their tech stacks and a hard look to ensure that they have the right tools for the jobs at hand. Our industry requires solutions that are designed for our unique requirements. Here, we share what our customers tell us about their needs for remote work and remote collaboration in media.
The need for speed
Our high-pressure industry requires teams to move masses of content as quickly as possible to meet tight deadlines. The more diffuse your workforce is, the more important speed becomes. Whether you are sending files back and forth to each other or accessing shared files on remote storage, ensuring that content gets where it needs to go as quickly as possible is mission critical.
Big files create big challenges
As files continue to get bigger, tools with file size limits are nonstarters. As such, services like Dropbox and SharePoint that work well in other industries simply will not support the workflows that our industry must complete. The power of remote work ultimately lies in its flexibility, and the idea that teams would be limited simply because of file size almost entirely defeats the purpose.
Creating efficiencies within teams, internally and externally
Because admins, operations personnel, and IT professionals manage dispersed workforces, intuitive, easy-to-manage and easy-to-delegate, centralised administrative features are fundamental to ensuring that remote teams can achieve success. Day to day operations such as adding and removing users, customising the experience, setting up alerts and running reports need to be done remotely and without IT intervention.
Maintaining control of your most valuable assets
Being able to confidently control where your content is stored is a major part of making remote access strategies work. Whilst some file sharing tools such as Dropbox force businesses to use storage that they own and operate, solutions that offer storage independence allow organisations to decide whether their files will live in the cloud, on-premise, or across a hybrid storage architecture. But most importantly, those valuable assets will always be in your storage and under your full control.
Taking advantage of the cloud
As the world went remote in 2020, Signiant saw a more than 230 per cent increase in data moving into and out of cloud storage on Media Shuttle. For many looking to build a supportive remote infrastructure, cloud storage has become an invaluable resource. Whilst storage independence is paramount, cloud storage offers IT teams the ability to spin up the storage they need, immediately and without ever setting foot in the office.
Protecting assets and reputations
Perhaps robust security is the most obvious and important thing that remote collaboration and file sharing solutions should provide. The need for defense-in-depth, enterprise-grade security in any solution you select allows you to indulge all of the incredible benefits of remote access whilst also ensuring that no unauthorised access occurs.
Keeping media on the move
The industry isn’t showing signs of going back to where we were before but rather focusing on shoring up those remote workflows, making them more permanent and more scalable by turning to enterprise-grade SaaS solutions like Media Shuttle that can adapt quickly as business demands evolve. As we all look forward to getting back to some level of normalcy in 2021, it does not appear that remote work is merely a trend that is going away.
