Balancing Cloud and On-Prem for Smarter Media Infrastructure

Over the past decade, cloud computing has emerged as a powerful alternative for deploying IT solutions. Many organizations have embraced third-party infrastructure, such as the cloud, to support a wide range of workloads and services. While this approach works well for many scenarios, certain services require a more deterministic and predictable environment, especially as they scale. They need to have the right control points from a cost and operational perspective.   

The cloud offers immense value for many use cases, but there are situations where having more fine-grained control becomes essential. For some applications and services, managing them on-prem can be more effective, while others are better in the cloud. For example, many Media and Entertainment (M&E) companies are adopting a hybrid approach that provides the flexibility to decide when to leverage the cloud—whether it’s for editing, storing, or delivering content—and when to rely on their own infrastructure.  

Challenges with live streaming  

Companies today face a critical challenge: achieving the agility they need while leveraging the elasticity of the cloud. The cloud is built to scale, offering varying capacities as required. However, this elasticity often doesn’t operate in real-time. For companies, including M&E companies, spinning up infrastructure can take minutes, which poses a problem for high-fidelity use cases like streaming to numerous endpoints where real-time responsiveness is crucial.  

Recently, we’ve seen instances where cloud services fell short of the expected service levels. So, one thing we can do is augment existing setups, deliver capacity and infrastructure with fine-tuned precision—offering a more responsive and cost-effective solution that complements what companies already have in place.  

While some organizations may choose to bring all their content creation, editing, and delivery on-prem, most will likely adopt a hybrid approach. For scenarios requiring very high degrees of capacity management and the ability to calibrate how much infrastructure you need at a given point in time that can grow and shrink as needed (in milliseconds rather than minutes) is what’s really going to challenge businesses going forward.   

What can we do about it?  

There is no right answer or perfect model. So, the question is how do you get the control to deliver the services you want as you need them, and at the right price point?   

The cloud offers a lot of great advantages for a large range of different workloads. But as we get to more augmented content creation, with real-time delivery at a much higher resolution and much higher content quality, then we see the need for companies to start creating their own infrastructure that allows them to do this at scale. A solution that allows both on-prem delivery, creation and editing, as well as using the cloud where appropriate, is what customers really need. But to do that, they can’t build out a large amount of infrastructure for that peak utilization – it needs to be scaled.   

One of the problems M&E companies face – and why the cloud is so popular – is that media and entertainment companies aren’t really designed to be an IT driven organization. They’re a creation driven organization, which doesn’t want to have to put in large amounts of infrastructure that they don’t know when they’ll need or are only needed at certain points in time.  It’s very expensive and inefficient, unless you can build infrastructure that can grow organically and easily as you need it, both in real-time and as your demands grow over time.

The ideal solution combines flexibility with absolute efficiency across your IT infrastructure. This approach enables you to allocate your budget strategically—whether investing in the equipment and infrastructure you need to build in-house or leveraging external resources, like the cloud, for additional scalability and support.   

How does Cerio help?  

We see the same technology needed to drive intensive computational infrastructure used for production, virtual stage production, editing, and delivery in non-data center-oriented environments like stages and studios.  

When we think of data centers, we often associate them as the primary environment where efficiency in technology is crucial. However, we’re seeing the same cutting-edge technologies that power data centers being increasingly applied to other areas like stages and studios for production, virtual stage production, editing, and content delivery.   

So, one of the things we need to be able to do is provide the right level of capacity at the right agility so those expensive resources aren’t stranded in large, heavy servers that can only exist in a data center environment. We need smaller form factors. We need to be able to drive more capacity and more density, but we still need the agility and flexibility to be able to reuse those assets across the entire workflow.  

That’s something Cerio has always designed for its platform. One of the key differentiators in the Cerio M&E Platform is that people can calibrate exactly the amount of infrastructure they need. They can reuse assets in real-time across the whole workflow of media creation, editing, and deployment. Not only that, but they can do it at scale regardless of the environment because they can pick and choose the right servers and GPUs that match their workloads, environment and demands. This technology allows organizations to apply infrastructure with precise accuracy—optimizing the amount needed, how it’s used, and ultimately, how it can be reused across different stages of the workflow. This fine-tuned approach ensures greater efficiency and flexibility throughout the entire process.  

At Cerio, we evolve alongside technology, your applications, your data center, and your business. Our goal is to ensure your environment is fully optimized for maximum efficiency and performance.