Media and entertainment companies are constantly innovating ways of attracting new customers and reaching out to existing ones. With millions of videos streamed daily today, competition for consumer attention is getting really tough. While marketers strategise the best ways to engage the consumer and hold their attention long enough to communicate key messages, IT managers are relied upon to provide and support uninterrupted, high quality audio and video capabilities. These media must also be available on any device, over any network, live or on-demand. The ability thus, to manage high volume, high traffic data is critical. All this without sacrificing security or performance. 

With Azure, this does not necessarily mean massive investments on IT infrastructure. Azure combines powerful and scalable cloud-based encoding, encryption and streaming components to power streaming solutions for consumers and organisations worldwide. Azure’s media services help companies reach out to larger audiences through all devices, with its flexible platform capable of handling even large-scale global events. Many international media organisations opt for Azure as their platform of choice to broadcast live and recorded sporting events, news, and concerts. 

Disaster Recovery 

System failures and interruptions can be detrimental to any media organisation. Azure Site Recovery works by constantly monitoring the health of systems and protecting all virtual machines (VMs). Azure is able to replace disaster recovery sites – this eliminates the need for media organisations to set aside the typically large investment required to develop and maintain secondary sites. Despite the already high level of assurance and protection, Microsoft, in July 2015, launched a new service that is capable of replicating private cloud and physical workloads to its Azure cloud for disaster recovery purposes. This means that customers are now able to replicate their VMs and workloads to Azure and recover them from the cloud. 

Azure’s got your back In cases of outages, Azure Site Recovery takes care of even the most complex multi-tiered workloads. Azure also provides a range of backup tools to prevent data loss and corruption, by providing secure, encrypted backups for servers and workloads. Media organisations handling time sensitive data can be assured of the security of their information, as data is encrypted during transit and when stored in Azure’s offsite data centres.