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Never has there been more urgency for Media and Entertainment (M&E) companies to pay closer attention to how their media data is stored, protected and connected. 2014 was a particularly telling year, with the hack of Sony grabbing most of the headlines, but that happened to be only one of 783 U.S. data breaches tracked for the year. And the even scarier part? 2014 represented a near-30 percent increase in the number of tracked breaches over 2013.
The M&E space contains a varied array of confidential digital assets, ranging from unreleased movie scripts and private e-mails to personal employee data such as salary and healthcare details. Furthermore, video production and distribution are evolving so fast that most organizations have fallen behind in how to best protect them.
In the case of Sony, it wasn’t the exposed data that hurt the company so much as the nature of the files that were compromised. These files consisted of confidential e-mail exchanges, credit card log-ins, Social Security numbers, the upcoming “007” movie script and other proprietary information Sony didn’t want revealed. The leaks starkly illustrated that sensitive files on the Sony Pictures network were neither encrypted nor password-protected, raising troubling questions about the company’s secure archive practices.
There are four considerations that we can take from this to help us ensure our data is safe.
Securely archiving media data has profound implications for large data storage. At its root, building an archive entails aligning the needs of your organization with available technology and policy integration needs. With so many data storage options available today, decision makers must ensure they’re making the right decisions in terms of active archive (readily-accessible data moved off primary storage) and deep archive (data typically not accessed but permanently retained).
But there’s a catch; protecting content is no longer a matter of months or years, it has become eternal…while still ensuring that content can be seamlessly accessed when needed. Simply put, the M&E space has evolved to a point where content must not only be retained indefinitely, but also secured continually.
These questions simply cannot be answered, because the information that’s required to respond to such queries is not readily available. The answers to these questions—and indeed the answer to this dilemma—comes from purpose-built secure archive solutions, which are specifically designed to provide maximum data security, integrity and privacy from the moment a file is ingested into the archive.
Today’s M&E organizations must equip themselves with the tools and technology needed to solve these content challenges. The key is making smart choices about how to protect the data that you care about most. In an industry tasked with storing and preserving enormous quantities of high-res images and high-definition videos, choosing the right archive product to securely protect that content is critical.
Assureon Secure Storage: More than just a security solution, Assureon can reduce storage costs and boost production efficiency all while protecting your high-value video content.
