Storage was already at a turning point, but 2020 forced companies to rethink how they store and access content
Words by Elsie Crampton
his has been a year of pivots. Media companies from top to bottom have had to question their business models and think carefully about how they plan to go forward in a world where Covid, the climate
growth, but this seems to serve more as confirmation of a trend that was already in motion. “We’ve actually had a massive surge in the use of our software because the world has gone remote,” says Jon Finegold, Signiant’s CMO. “But it’s been an acceleration of things that were happening already – things that for the last several years were starting to move in a certain direction and have now just spiked.” The most dramatic surge Signiant has seen is in the use of cloud storage. With the company’s Media Shuttle product so widely used, Signiant is able to obtain a unique perspective on media industry activity. “Looking at the data being moved into and out of the cloud by Media Shuttle, month by month, from September 2019 until September 2020, you could see a real surge between March and April. After that, it’s been pretty steady growth since,” explains Finegold. Signiant saw a 230% increase in the amount of data being moved into the cloud over the past year. Media Shuttle’s use by major media enterprises means that petabytes of data are being moved. As such, that 230% is a big jump from what was already a very big number.
emergency and economic uncertainty are bound to impact their bottom lines. Easy access to your content has never been more important, and the fight between cloud and on-premises is neither as binary nor simplistic as marketers would have you believe. Getting the right solution for storage requires consideration, planning and practicality. Storage is about access. It might mean putting assets that are on ice into long-term storage or, as has been the case for a year now, moving big files in and out of virtual storage. Signiant is a software company that specialises in helping media companies move files around. In a drag-and-drop culture, it can be hard to appreciate how non-trivial it is to exchange the number of downright massive files that now form the daily workload of the media industry. With the transition to widespread remote working, Signiant has seen significant business
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