In the world of content production, engineering teams will typically spend the majority of their time working with operational teams to design and implement solutions that most effectively enable the creation, management and delivery of content. Unfortunately, historically, this has meant that solutions to protect this content have taken a back seat. Imagine yourself in these situations:
- Your Florida-based affiliate experiences a hurricane along with a torrential downpour that ultimately floods your server room, damaging everything
- A trainee going through his first internship at your network accidentally deletes terabytes of media and metadata that were meant to be used in tomorrow morning’s news broadcast
- An earthquake causes irreversible damage to your post-production house in Los Angeles
While these situations are of different magnitudes and vary in potential consequences, they are all disasters that can happen at any given moment, and therefore, indicate the significance of considering a Disaster Recovery solution.
As workflow designers and systems integrators, we try to speak the language of all stakeholders involved in a particular project. For example, in this case, we understand that typically management teams are concerned with Business Continuity, and they care about producing a business-oriented plan that assesses risks and determines the overall strategy of how the organization will respond those risks – what can be endured, what can be transferred, and what must absolutely be mitigated. The way in which we go about ensuring Business Continuity is by assisting engineering teams in creating a Disaster Recovery Plan and implementing a Disaster Recovery Solution based on that plan. As always, our approach to this is entirely end-to-end. In other words, we’ll work from the design stage through the implementation and maintenance stage. This will typically come in the form of consulting on what the solution should look like, calculating certain metrics such as Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) alongside the client, and putting forth recommendations that maximize redundancy and safety while keeping costs low. Active involvement throughout these phases will only further enable us to adequately support the installation post implementation.
