What is IaaS and why should post houses care?

Ten years ago, the media and entertainment industry was just beginning to use Software as a Service in our workflows, and we only really started to embrace it as recently as two years ago when circumstances pretty much demanded an adapt-or-die approach. Now, we can’t imagine not having the benefits that SaaS provides: access from anywhere, immediate ability to scale, freedom from software updates…the list goes on.

But what if we could apply those same principles to the physical infrastructure that we use to complete our work? What if your basic laptop could be upgraded with extra RAM, networking and graphics capabilities on the fly from anywhere at any time? And what if, when you weren’t using those capabilities, you could release them back to a pooled set of resources to be accessed by other members of your team in the same way? That’s the basic premise behind hyperconverged, or virtualised, infrastructure.

Corporate businesses have virtualised their backroom services for years, but the M&E industry – and post-production in particular - has been slow to follow suit due to the costs associated with the large file sizes, demanding compute and high bandwidth requirements of high-resolution media production.

However, since Nutanix was certified as the first HCI-powered private cloud solution for Avid products, and as the demand for remote working solutions continues to rise, an increasing number of M&E companies have invested in on-site virtualisation. But, unless you’re a fairly big M&E business virtualising your infrastructure is probably going to be too expensive for you. That’s where infrastructure as a service comes in.

IaaS has all the benefits of virtualised infrastructure without the cost commitment or the responsibility - because you aren’t purchasing or managing the technology. Instead, you’re supplied with media storage, virtual workstations and networking on a pay-as-you-go basis as part of a managed service.

What this means for post houses is that you can spin up new edit suites in less than 24 hours to meet demand, and simply turn them off when the project’s done, rather than sinking money into hardware you barely use. And instead of spending your time managing your infrastructure, you can focus your energy on managing the media workloads for your production customers.

Visit our website or get in touch with the Jigsaw24 Media team to find out more.