Life is often a compromise and it is also true for selecting IT-solutions for organisations.

I continue to use our media company as an example for how to define a cloud strategy. Albeit small, with twelve main processes and lots of interactions with other parties, it’s getting complex quite fast.

Film production is neither a digital only business. The real work is carried out on set with real people, not bots and avatars.

When the film is published, then everything could be digital, but content production is a different story.

We have a cloud first strategy, as we don’t want to bother with internal IT and we collaborate with different parties all over the world.

But, then we have the reality in post-production. Nobody uses bespoke editing applications, so you have to choose what software houses are offering you and they are not yet cloud friendly.

Editing 4K and 8K media is very demanding hardware wise as you need really fast CPU’s, high-end graphics, fast and large storage (several TB of data per project) and very high-bandwidth connections. Few ISP offers affordable 10 Gb/s internet connections and this is why we need local IT for some tasks.

But films are made outside the editing rooms and review of films need collaboration with both clients, directors and other stakeholders. Therefore we need hybrid solutions were some parts of the workflow is run locally and some parts in the cloud.

The audience most often want to see the finalised films on streaming platforms, so in the end, we need to deliver digital media. to the cloud.

What about security? Not even Sony Pictures managed to be secure enough.

I’m very sure that major cloud providers will have better security than us, if we had to expose our internal IT systems to Internet in order to collaborate with others.

Luckily, as a startup, we don’t have much legacy IT to cope with. Our CRM, Financials, HR, E-mail and project management systems are all done in the cloud. But, there are downsides also with the cloud solutions today. We have different vendors of SaaS-platforms and integration today is subpar. It’s getting better and better and we have to be flexible to change systems if the platform doesn’t develops further.

But for a large corporations with a long history of bespoke IT-solutions, it’s not that easy. This is why you have to be realistic about cloud strategies and have a strategy why, what, how and when migrating to the cloud.

Disruptive architecture