Audio In The Cloud

The need for audio-media companies to conveniently ingest, share, exchange, and distribute file-based digital content quickly, easily, securely, and with the scale-out capacity of cloud platforms is at an all-time high – particularly in the US and Europe, says Francois Quereuil, Senior Director of Worldwide Marketing, Aspera, an IBM Company.

High-frequency sharing of content across organizations is a fundamental part of the digital audio supply chain and a key to remaining competitive. Cloud platforms offer great efficiencies, and yet, to date, audio companies have had to build their own piecemeal solutions to the file exchange problem, including managing their own file exchange software on their own cloud and on-premises systems.

This has resulted in a constant struggle to increase transfer throughput and storage capacity to meet user needs, to support ever larger formats even within cloud object storage file systems, to achieve security within and between organizations, and to keep up with the accelerating demands of shrinking production cycles.

To solve the challenges highlighted above, we introduced Aspera Files, a single software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that allows media organisations of any size to establish a branded web-based presence for fast, easy and secure exchange of file-based media content between end users. Content can be stored and accessed in multiple cloud and on-premise storage systems.

Built on Aspera's award-winning and patented FASP technology, there are no file size or speed limits, so audio-media companies can transfer large amounts of content fast and seamlessly using any combination of storage types with high-speed Aspera transfer.

While the cloud offers many benefits, moving your big data to the cloud can be challenging. Traditional transfer software technologies are slow and unreliable, and shipping physical disk storage is time consuming, expensive and exposes your data to unnecessary security risks.

In light of this, audio-media companies are also utilizing the power of our new offering, Aspera Transfer Service (ATS), a truly universal high-speed transfer platform. It sits at the heart of our on-premise and in-the-cloud transfer server software and solves the fundamental problems that exist with data movement over long-haul wide area networks.

Aspera Transfer Service supports transfers of any data type or size, leveraging all infrastructure and storage types, regardless of location, with maximum speed and a comprehensive offering for all transport paradigms and deployment models.

Aspera On Demand is also making rapid and secure transfer of content to the cloud easier for audio-production delivery. It enables efficient, large-scale workflows, with enterprise-grade security, a variety of client options (web, mobile, embedded), and applications for ingest, sharing, collaboration and exchange of big data, available as on-demand subscription services.

Featuring "Direct-to-Object storage" capability, which tightly integrates FASP transfers with the native object storage APIs, it enables users to securely move their data directly into cloud-based object storage at line speed from any Aspera Client over wide area networks.

All Aspera products have complete, built-in security for data transfers using the standard open-source OpenSSL toolkit. The OpenSSL cryptographic libraries and the standard secure shell (SSH) are used unmodified to take full advantage of the standard. Aspera's products have been approved by the US Department of Commerce for export as a mass-market encryption product with greater than 64-bit encryption.

The security model consists of session encryption (to establish a secure channel for exchanging a random per-session key for data encryption), secure authentication of the transfer endpoints, on-the-fly data encryption, and integrity verification for each transmitted data block. The transfer preserves the native file system access control attributes between any of the supported operating systems.

In 2016, we introduced server-side encryption at rest in addition to client-side, as well as in-transit encryption.

As audio-media companies become more comfortable with the cloud, cloud-based production is set to increase over the coming years. However, companies are likely to use a combination of cloud-based and on-premises systems for many years to come, so it's important to deploy infrastructure-agnostic solutions that enable them to store and readily access content in multiple cloud and on-premise storage solutions.

The ability to share content anywhere will enable a new world of collaboration, sharing and content delivery.

www.aspera.com

This article is also available to read at BFV online here, page 34.

(JP/LM)