Multi-cloud for broadcasters: Making the right choice

We have entered the multi-cloud era, with the availability of Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud and the other hyperscale platforms creating huge opportunities.

And there have been a slew of start-ups with services to optimise movement of content between clouds while established workflow businesses are looking to multi cloud solutions as their next growth market.

As broadcasters, production houses, content creators and distributors become increasingly cloud dependent are they at risk of facing cloud sprawl – having to manage many workloads across different platforms – and facing the prospect of growing costs?

Or, once they get onto different clouds is there a danger of cloud stall, where migration projects might falter? And as broadcasters build partner ecosystems will they have to build APIs for every different cloud platform?

The cloud promised to end vendor lock in but nothing is ever simple and one cloud platform can have little commercial interest in helping its customers move workloads to another cloud provider.

David Richards, Chief Executive of software and services firm Wandisco, says: “Some cloud platforms are more…