We have recently seen massive growth in cloud computing. Gartner forecasts cloud computing to grow by 23% in 2021. Remote work and the growth of online businesses has helped fuel this growth. As an organization, you might be storing a lot of videos – whether they be internal training videos or recorded Zoom meetings. It might be a good idea to move these videos to the cloud and use a centralized cloud platform to manage them.
This blog discusses what cloud computing has to offer when it comes to storage, management and usage of your video data.
The Cloud Offers Much More Than Storage
Moving video to the cloud does not mean just storing them in a remote data centre somewhere. It also does not mean downloading the video files every time you need to access them. You can perform various other functions in the cloud, the most popular one being video streaming. In simple terms, this is like having a YouTube-like portal for your organization where you can upload videos and view them through the browser.
There is a range of cloud video platforms that allow you to benefit from cloud services on top of your storage. Examples include AI for translation and transcription, facial recognition, object recognition, live streaming services and more.
Management of Large Video Files is Much More Convenient
An hour of 4K video can be up to 22 GBs in size! If you need to share a video with someone through traditional means, you’d need to upload a 22 GB video and then share it ahead with your recipient. This person too would need to download the 22 GB video just to view it. The process can be time-consuming and gruesome.
Managing and streaming video in the cloud can be much more convenient. Again, through means of cloud video platforms, all you need to do is access your desired video from a browser, copy its link and share ahead. The recipients can easily view it through the browser, in the same way as they do on YouTube.
It’s Crucial for Remote Work
It’s an issue if your videos are stored on local drives with no means to remotely access and collaborate on them. These can be onboarding videos that you need to share with new hires or a recorded meeting that one of your colleagues missed. By storing videos in the cloud and accessing them through the internet, you enable your workforce to view and share videos from wherever they are located.
The Cloud is Highly Scalable
As discussed previously, video data is large in size. With increasing video usage in organizations, scaling up can be an issue as you would need to invest in additional storage infrastructure. This could be time-consuming if additional hardware needs to be procured and installed. If you store and manage video in the cloud, this can be done easily and quickly as all you need to do is buy extra storage from your cloud provider.
Cost Management
If your total video storage is in TBs, then storing and managing them can be a costly affair. This is less of an issue in the cloud as you only pay for the amount of storage you use. Moreover, leading cloud providers offer tiering technology to move less-frequently used video assets to cold or archival storage, which costs less.
Security and Data Privacy
For various compliance requirements, you may need to implement technical safeguards on your own on-premise data center or local drives. Take encryption mechanisms for instance. This can be costly and a complicated process to implement. Leading cloud providers, on the other hand, have these in place to ensure the fulfilment of compliance requirements. This is much more cost-effective and less complicated to implement.
Data Backups and Availability
To safeguard your video data from hardware failures, accidents, natural disasters etc., it’s important to keep backups of your data. This can be costly and difficult to manage if you do it yourself. However, leading cloud providers provide you with convenient services to replicate your data and keep copies of it in multiple locations.
Conclusion
The cloud has much more to offer as opposed to legacy systems. This blog discussed some of the reasons why your organization should consider moving video data to the cloud. Even if you have TBs of video data stored on local drives, moving the cloud is not much of an issue due to migration services offered by some of the leading cloud providers. This involves shipping hard drives to datacenters or using bulk upload tools that run in the background on desktop computers.
If you are looking to move video data to the cloud, we’d recommend opting for cloud video platform vendors that offer you the right applications, basically a YouTube-like interface to manage and stream your videos in the cloud directly.
Check out: How Does Cloud Computing Helping the Healthcare Industry