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Creative Media Production Company Consolidating Frame.io and VPN
Company Situation
The company is a mid-sized creative media production team of about a dozen people. Their work primarily involves video and photography content creation, with annual data volumes ranging from 40 to 60 terabytes. The team operates in a hybrid work environment, with some members working remotely and others on-site, often collaborating with an attached advertising agency.
Existing Workflow
Currently, the team relies on an on-premises server infrastructure with a traditional VPN setup for file access. They use local redundant servers with scheduled backups to an off-site petabyte-scale backup system. For company-facing workflows, they utilize Frame.io for review and approval. Editing is mostly done locally on SSD drives, with media uploaded back to the server upon project completion. Their backup storage acts purely as a failsafe and is not searchable; all media searches occur only on local storage. They manage multiple servers and backups, especially as the business grows through acquisitions, adding complexity and overhead.
Issues with the Existing Workflow
Managing multiple local servers and off-site backups increases operational complexity and maintenance overhead.
Hybrid work creates challenges with file access and synchronization, especially when users switch between in-office desktops and laptops.
Legacy VPN and server infrastructure require significant orchestration for file movement across projects and years, including manual archiving and retrieval of older projects.
Searching for and accessing archived content is cumbersome, often requiring physical retrieval of drives.
The cost and effort to scale storage with new acquisitions are high, including adding new servers and backup capacity.
While Frame.io supports company review, the team is open to exploring more integrated solutions for media management and review.
How Shade Would Change Their Workflow
Shade offers a cloud-native media management platform designed to replace the need for multiple physical storage servers and complex backup routines. By shifting to Shade, the company would:
- Treat the cloud as the primary storage environment, eliminating local servers as the bottleneck and reducing hardware management.
- Enable direct, instant access to media files from any location without VPN or remote desktop, supporting their hybrid work model seamlessly.
- Provide a unified platform that integrates ingestion, media management, review and approval, and archival workflows in one solution, streamlining operations.
- Allow editors to continue local editing workflows by syncing projects from Shade to SSD drives but with faster upload and download cycles.
- Eliminate the need for separate off-site backup orchestration, as cloud storage inherently includes redundancy and backup.
- Improve searchability and accessibility of archived content, removing dependence on physical drives and manual retrieval.
- Facilitate easier scaling of storage with business growth without adding additional on-premise hardware or backup complexity.
Benefits
- Simplified storage infrastructure with no need to manage multiple local servers and backups.
- Enhanced hybrid work support, enabling seamless file access from office or remote locations.
- Streamlined media workflows combining ingestion, management, review, and archival in one platform.
- Reduced operational overhead and increased scalability aligned with business growth.
- Faster and easier access to archived content, improving productivity.
- Potential to replace Frame.io with integrated review and approval tools within Shade.
- Cost efficiencies by consolidating multiple tools and hardware into a single cloud-native platform.