According to a recent survey conducted by Wasabi, media and entertainment (M&E) companies are rapidly turning to cloud storage in order to upgrade their security measures. The survey findings highlighted that while M&E organizations are still relatively new to cloud storage, public cloud storage use is on the rise, with 89% of respondents looking to increase or maintain their cloud services.
M&E respondents said they allocate 13.9% of their IT budgets to public cloud storage services, on average. However, overdrawn budgets due to hidden fees, alongside cybersecurity and data loss concerns, remain problematic for M&E organizations. More than half of M&E organizations exceeded budgeted spend on cloud storage services in the last year.
The media and entertainment industry is a key vertical for cloud storage services, driven by the need for accessibility to large media files among multiple organizations and geographically distributed teams. However, the complex fee structures and cybersecurity concerns remain obstacles for many M&E organizations. Understanding the costs and fees associated with cloud usage was cited as the number one cloud migration challenge for M&E organizations.
M&E organizations rely heavily on data access, egress and ingress, a key reason why M&E respondents indicated the highest prevalence of API call fees compared to the global average. M&E respondents showed a very high prevalence of data migration to cloud, with 95% saying they migrated storage from on-premises to public cloud in the last year.
M&E respondents increasing their public cloud storage budgets in the next 12 months cited new data security, backup and recovery requirements as the top reason driving the increase, compared to the global average where security ranked third. 45% of M&E organizations reported using more than one public cloud provider. Data security requirements were one of the top reasons why M&E organizations were choosing a multi-cloud strategy, ranking a close second to different buying centers within the organization making their own purchase decisions.
The top three security concerns for M&E organizations with public cloud include: lack of native security services, lack of native backup, disaster, and data protection tools and services, and lack of experience with cloud platforms or adequate security training.
“Organizations in the media and entertainment industry are flocking to cloud storage as their digital assets need to be stored securely, cost-effectively and accessed quickly,” said Whit Jackson, VP of Media and Entertainment at Wasabi. The survey results show that while public cloud storage is still relatively new to the M&E industry, it is quickly becoming a preferred method of storing and accessing data due to its many advantages.