By now, we know that modern cloud-based media supply chains bring levels of agility, responsiveness, scalability, and efficiency that are simply not possible with on-premises technical infrastructure. Taking advantage of the inherent elasticity of super-scaler cloud providers means being able to precisely match resources to changing workloads, and to scale up rapidly when demand bursts (and scale back down when demand subsides).

To date, most companies who use cloud services tend to aggregate their cloud usage within one of the large providers due to pricing advantages, functional superiority, integration simplification, and staff training and skill accumulation. Increasingly, however, companies are beginning to reexamine those benefits in light of concerns about geopolitical tensions, regional data-sovereignty discussions, occasional technical glitches, and worries about vendor lock-in. For some media companies, particularly those with operations in Europe, there are legitimate concerns about maintaining control over data and workflows in the cloud.

What issues could arise if content lives entirely under one provider’s control? What if costs change, or regulations and policies do? How hard would it be to move? And what happens to existing investments in optimized, cloud-enabled operations?

These are valid concerns. But they all become manageable if the heavy lifting of media storage, compute, and application processing can take place in the cloud, or across different clouds, that best meet your organization’s technical and business needs.

In the blog, we take a closer look at the composition of a cloud-based media supply chain — and how Rally supports whichever cloud architecture you choose.