19 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE AWS
THE STUDIOS ARE LOOKING TO US TO KEEP THEM COMPLIANT AND, IN FACT, TOMODERNISE THEM went. They really didn’t notice a difference. In fact, they saw some performance improvements, which is great. Since then we’ve been able to deploy some security changes that we wanted to deploy, and we’ve added some capabilities for disaster recovery.” Given the big studios’ deep concerns about information security, Entertainment Partners wondered if there would be any objections to the involvement of an off- premises third partner. “We got no pushback from any of our clients,” says Ehlers. “In fact, a lot of them were happy that we were moving to AWS, away from our own private environment. Some of them had already adopted AWS, so they were comfortable with it. The perception seems to be that AWS is very secure in the market, and customers saw the move as an improvement in security.” GETTING SMART WITH SCHEDULING Entertainment Partners has been working hard to guarantee the studios a safe data environment. A leaked script, or even a call sheet, could wreck a shoot, not to mention the reams of contract and financial data generated by a production. Scenechronize was one of the first Entertainment Partners production tools that was placed fully into AWS. Scenechronize is a cloud-based scheduling and production management platform that works across devices and houses every document generated by the production. Its capabilities include easy script breakdowns, slide creation,
watermarking and sophisticated permissions management. Entertainment Partners’ SmartAccounting is the product most recently being transitioned into an AWS environment. SmartAccounting manages the production accounting process through the whole life cycle of the production and then feeds into the payroll system that Entertainment Partners uses to pay out of. “Scenechronize and SmartAccounting are the tools and products most used by our customers, and, of course, they’re the largest in the industry too,” says Martin Mazor, Entertainment Partners’ chief information security officer. Having a system that approached zero downtime was also essential. “We wanted to go from a two-nine to four-nine availability metric: from 99% to 99.99% availability,” says Mazor. “And that four- nine model, in the IT world, is an incredibly hard thing to do. A four-nine (99.99%) availability metric is saying you’ve got roughly five minutes of unplanned downtime a month. And we got there based on AWS’s auto-scaling capabilities and a multi-region model. “To do that, not just the application, but the engineering of the product infrastructure itself has to be built around that four-nine model. For us, both Scenechronize and SmartAccounting are built in two regions in a parallel model. We’re using both US West and US East AWS data centres, and they replicate in real time between themselves. They’re also in two different data centres in each of those two regions. So we’re replicated into four data centres. A lot has to happen before a user is impacted.” It looks like studio back office infrastructure really is moving on from the days of Cecil B. DeMille. But one
Hollywood truism still remains unalterable: when a studio head tells you to make something work, it had better work – or else. Entertainment Partners is definitely making it work. “All of this may seem like a bit of overkill
in some situations,” admits Mazor, “but getting that 99.99 availability metric is paramount for us.
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