Top public cloud security concerns for the media and entertainment industry

Media and entertainment (M&E) companies are rapidly turning to cloud storage in efforts to upgrade their security measures, according Wasabi.

Survey findings highlighted that, while M&E organizations are still relatively new to cloud storage (69% of respondents had been using cloud storage for three years or less), public cloud storage use is on the rise, with 89% of respondents looking to increase (74%) or maintain (15%) their cloud services.

Balancing budgets, security, and data loss risks

M&E respondents said they allocate 13.9% of their IT budgets to public cloud storage services, on average. However, overdrawn budgets due to hidden fees, alongside cybersecurity and data loss concerns, remain problematic for M&E organisations.

“The media and entertainment industry is a key vertical for cloud storage services, driven by the need for accessibility to large media files among multiple organizations and geographically distributed teams,” said Andrew Smith, senior manager of strategy and market intelligence at Wasabi Technologies, and a former IDC analyst.

“While complex fee structures and cybersecurity concerns remain obstacles for many M&E organizations, planned increases in cloud storage budgeting over the next year, combined with a very high prevalence of storage migration from on premises to cloud; clearly shows the M&E industry is embracing and growing their cloud storage use year on year,” concluded Smith.

Media and entertainment industry cloud budgets exceeded

• More than half of M&E organizations exceeded budgeted spend on cloud storage services in the last year.
• 49% of M&E organisations’ public cloud storage bill was comprised of fees in 2022, with the other half going to actual storage capacity used.
• Understanding the costs and fees associated with cloud usage was cited as the number one cloud migration challenge for M&E organizations.
• M&E organizations rely heavily on data access, egress and ingress, a key reason why M&E respondents indicated the highest prevalence of API call fees compared to the global average.
• M&E respondents showed a very high prevalence of data migration to cloud, with 95% saying they migrated storage from on-premises to public cloud in the last year.

Cybersecurity and data loss concernes

• M&E respondents increasing their public cloud storage budgets in the next 12 months cited new data security, backup and recovery requirements as the top reason driving the increase, compared to the global average where security ranked third.
• 45% of M&E organizations reported using more than one public cloud provider. Data security requirements were one of the top reasons why M&E organizations were choosing a multi-cloud strategy, ranking a close second (44%) to different buying centres within the organization making their own purchase decisions (47%).
• The top three biggest security concerns M&E organizations have with public cloud include:
• Lack of native security services (42%)
• Lack of native backup, disaster and data protection tools and services (39%)
• Lack of experience with cloud platform or adequate security training (38%)

“Organizations in the media and entertainment industry are flocking to cloud storage as their digital assets need to be stored securely, cost-effectively and accessed quickly,” said Whit Jackson, VP of Media and Entertainment at Wasabi.