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Thinking of Moving Your On-Prem Studio to the Cloud? What to Consider

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If your editorial and production workflows are not yet in the public cloud, making that happen is very likely high on your list of to-dos.

If you’re already operating in the cloud, we’ll bet some of the impetus to get there might have involved an extreme or unexpected situation—like an incredible opportunity with an incredibly short timeline (as in, “there are literally not enough hours in the day to render what the client just approved”), or finding ways around a shortage of talent where it’s needed. Or today, as we find ourselves suddenly away from our studios, and working from home.

The cloud can transform all of these situations, helping us rapidly adapt any part of the workflow as we find new ways to work.

Leveraging cloud-based infrastructure and data services mean you can pivot when needed so that your operation won’t miss a beat in the face of a challenge. To know when the time is right for you, start by evaluating your current capabilities, noting opportunities for improvement:

  • Can my mission-critical applications be accessed by artists, anywhere in the world, with studio-quality frame rates, full color space, and high performance for this high-fidelity work?
  • Are all of my studio’s applications easily able to expand or shrink on-demand?
  • Does my infrastructure support making the remote work environment feel like the environment from inside my studio space?
  • Can I set up or move a workstation for a new or relocated employee in under an hour? In under five minutes?

Now that you’ve started the initial evaluation process, it’s time to think about the requirements that will best meet your organization’s needs. For example, how do you enable remote employees to use the cloud when your file data is tied to the servers and workstations running in your studio? You need to look beyond traditional solutions.

When moving a creative production workflow to the cloud, there are a number of requirements you should expect from your file system in order to support your workloads. Consider these:

  • Will this product allow me to utilize the apps that are critical to my business (and which we already own!), such as Cinema 4D, Maya, Premiere Pro, 3ds Max?
  • When we make a major investment in the cloud, will we be forced to commit to a single cloud platform?
  • How can my artists get real-time performance for interactive work in the cloud?
  • What is the most efficient way to get our raw footage to the cloud?

Modern solutions such as Qumulo’s hybrid file software rise to the challenge and solve for all of these questions. Qumulo’s cloud-native file system isn’t bound to any particular cloud platform—it is consumable on AWS and GCP. Qumulo CloudStudio is the easiest way to replicate your on-prem studio environment in the cloud.

Qumulo CloudStudio enables applications (and users) to access large quantities of file data, in real-time, no matter where the app or data resides. You can create a new, stand-alone studio environment in the cloud, or attach your cloud environment to your on-prem environment as a hybrid cloud solution.

Some of the world’s largest movie studios, streaming content providers, and gaming companies are using Qumulo CloudStudio to power their customized pre and post-production workflows at scale—and get content to market faster than they could ever before.

Here’s why CloudStudio is the best thing you can leverage in your studio workflow:

USE THE PRO APPS YOU ALREADY KNOW (AND OWN)
Qumulo CloudStudio works with many software tools used in post-production today—Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max, Nuke, Maya, and others. Qumulo running in the cloud provides best-in-class NFS and SMB protocol support, automatic cross-protocol permissions handling, and full metadata fidelity. Combined with ultra low-latency remote PCoIP clients such as those by Teradici, remote artists get the same level of application responsiveness they’re used to, because applications get the same enterprise-grade file storage they need to run properly.

SAFETY AND SECURITY
Qumulo CloudStudio can be your co-star when creating a TPN-compliant studio. With a private cloud configuration and virtual workstations with the ability to have no data stored at the access point (or encrypted local storage if needed), it’s all under your control. This is not always the case with multi-tenant SaaS offerings, and certainly not the case when full resolution data is stored locally at each workstation.

SCALE TO TACKLE ANY CHALLENGE AT A MOMENTS’ NOTICE
Qumulo CloudStudio allows studios to work on projects from anywhere in the world with uncompromising speed, flexibility, and security. When production schedules get tight, or animations grow increasingly complex, Qumulo CloudStudio enables studio managers to quickly harness more computing power and capacity in near-real time to tackle complex render workloads on specialized cloud compute instances. It’s easy to spin up thousands of CPU and GPU instances in AWS or GCP, and turn render time into an adjustable variable.

PROGRAMMABLE CONTROL
Qumulo’s programmable API lets you automate manual work to optimize storage usage, capacity and performance. Because Qumulo’s software provides API-access to the data stored on it, you can take advantage of native cloud services by piping that data to these cloud services. In a few simple steps, you have taken your on-prem workstation apps, moved them to the cloud, and set the stage to use that application data in bold new ways with modern cloud-native services and APIs. All without changing your workflow, or replacing any applications. Same set-up, now with amazing new capabilities.

YOUR DATA, WHEREVER YOU NEED IT
Qumulo’s hybrid file software supports a wide range of on-prem and cloud platforms, ensuring that no matter what your requirements are today, or how they evolve over time, Qumulo has you covered.

MAKE INFORMED DECISIONS ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS
CloudStudio gives administrators peace of mind, as all assets are stored in Qumulo’s file system where data access can be seen, managed, and controlled in real-time. Qumulo’s file system provides real-time analytics that help organizations to understand overall storage usage, throughput and source files, and client IP addresses, simplifying the management of costs and timelines.

AND ALL THE OTHER ENTERPRISE FEATURES YOU’D EXPECT
All the features you expect from an enterprise storage product, such as data protection, snapshots, and replication, are in the cloud with Qumulo.

FREEDOM TO CREATE
Qumulo CloudStudio allows artists to use the best-in-class applications they prefer, allows for massive scale at a moment’s notice, and removes the bottlenecks of corporate LANs, physical assets, and even constraints of time zone and location. All so creators can do what they do best…creating, editing, and delivering amazing content.

Interested in learning more? Read our white paper, “How to Ensure Creative Production Never Skips a Beat by Using Cloud-Native Services,” or watch this video, “Benefits for Studios Moving Digital Workloads to the Cloud.”

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