Global video streaming revenues are expected to reach $184.3 billion by 2027, according to Grand View Research, at a CAGR of 20.4% from 2020 to 2027. As video streaming subscriptions rise, more and more video service providers are adopting cloud services for media processing and delivery.
The reason they are moving to the cloud is simple. Using a cloud-based media processing and delivery service frees up providers to focus on revenue-generating tasks and customer needs. By outsourcing functionalities that do not influence the subscriber experience, service providers can focus on improving their app, content, feature sets and more.
Resiliency has proven to be a critical requirement over the past several months, as several providers have had to evolve business initiatives to adapt to changes in demand, while ensuring service continuity. Our relationship with cloud providers can be essential, and it’s important to not keep your eggs all in the same basket.
The recent outage that AWS experienced had major impacts across multiple industries and services were down with no other option than wait for AWS to get things up and running again. David Heinemeier Hansson, the CTO of Basecamp, commented that “maybe running half the internet off the same cloud service wasn’t such a great idea after all.”
Having the flexibility to rely on multiple, different cloud providers for your services helps to keep your business agile, resilient and also enables your business to more easily adapt to unexpected changes.
Cloud Portability so Your Video Service Can Evolve
A media processing and delivery service that offers cloud portability will allow you to move applications and data from one cloud computing environment to another, seamlessly. This is essential if you need the freedom to select a cloud provider as your business needs change.
For example, maybe you start in a private cloud and then choose to transition some of those services to the public cloud. A portable video streaming solution ensures that you have the flexibility to leverage the deployment model and the cloud provider, or providers, that make sense for your business.
What is Cloud Neutrality?
Cloud neutrality is when your solution or service can run in any cloud environment. It ensures that regardless of your cloud vendor, you benefit from not only the same features, but also, you’re not locked out of using other cloud services, or even switching from one cloud service provider to the other seamlessly.
How Does Cloud Neutrality Help Ensure Uptime?
Cloud neutrality solutions enable you to run your video services without being locked into a single cloud provider. Here are a few reasons why cloud-neutrality is an important capability for any video solution.
Resiliency and the multi-cloud approach: To protect your services from outages and downtime that even your cloud provider could face, you need a cloud-neutral platform that can run in multiple, different cloud environments like Google Cloud, AWS, or Microsoft Azure. For example, your main media processing services would be running on Microsoft Azure while a second instance is running as a backup on Google Cloud.
Or you could run your service in your private cloud and have the backup service running in the public cloud with any, or multiple cloud providers. In both cases, your video services will be delivered with the same level of quality and efficiency, regardless of the cloud provider. To learn more about how to ensure service continuity check out this blog .
Geo-Redundancy: Not only can you ensure redundancy with a multi-cloud approach that ensure real resiliency, you can also leverage cloud-neutral video solutions to ensure geo redundancy. Geo-redundancy describes the physical installation of data centers across multiple geographic locations.
Relying on a video solution that uses only a single cloud provider could increase the risk of outage if ever the cloud provider has an outage across their network. A solution that is cloud-neutral, and that can run on different cloud platforms in different environments that are also geo redundant ensures higher availability, worldwide.
Portability: Cloud-neutrality will allow you to move applications and data from one cloud computing environment to another, seamlessly. This is essential if you need the freedom to select a cloud provider as your business needs change.
For example, maybe you start in a private cloud, and then choose to transition some of those services to public cloud. Or maybe you use multiple cloud vendors for greater resiliency. A portable video streaming solution is one that gives you flexibility to leverage the deployment model and cloud provider, or providers, that makes sense for your business.
To learn more about how to leverage to cloud for video delivery and see the real benefits for your video business, check out this blog.
Reducing Risk and Ensuring Uptime
In today's world, it’s essential to have flexible, reliable solutions to handle unexpected change, or shifts in consumer demand and habits. Resilient, reliable solutions can be the saving grace for your business.
Cloud services are practically a requirement, and cloud-neutrality with cloud-native capabilities are clearly a must have. Not only for your peace of mind, but to protect your business and to take advantage of unexpected market opportunities when they arise.
Cloud-neutral and cloud-native platforms will provide you with the most flexibility for video streaming, enabling multi-cloud redundancy and cloud portability with any major cloud infrastructure provider. Harmonic’s VOS®360 platforms were created from the ground up as a cloud-native and run on any of the three major cloud platforms: Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS. Get in touch to learn more about how cloud-neutrality and portability can help you meet your video delivery objectives.
