As you may recall, last week we looked at the transformational role of the public cloud in delivering captioning services and if it’s secure enough. This week, we’ll take a look at how the costs stack up versus traditional on-premise solutions and the role of public cloud in future transformation.

How do costs compare?

Cost is a significant driver for moving to public cloud, but a reliable Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) comparison is very hard to do. Traditional on-premise solutions are costed on installed capacity over a contract period of years. Cloud solutions are charged on actual capacity used by the hour. When buying hardware we’re in the habit of over-specifying what we need because we account for a lifespan of years; for the cloud we need to break that habit and try to specify what we need hour by hour. This can mean growing a deployment week by week rather than trying to build five years’ capacity up front, but it can also mean looking at capacity usage across the day, week, month and year.

With live captioning there are specific peaks of activity during the day when networked stations run local programmes. This has defined technical capacity to the extent that for 23 hours of the day, most of it is lying idle. We know exactly in advance when these peaks are, so provisioning capacity for them doesn’t require any sophisticated auto-scaling capability, it just requires integration with the broadcast schedules.

For Disaster Recovery (DR), a bit of engineering can get a resilient structure without paying for double the capacity. By adopting a “pilot light” approach to DR, we can have a continual data backup with the full duplicate infrastructure ready to be instantiated within a few minutes and collapsed again as soon it’s no longer needed.

Transforming for the future

Much is said about the transformational value of the cloud, but it’s important to recognise that this is a business transformation more than a technical one. We’re used to locking ourselves into a long hardware investment cycle which defines and limits what we can achieve for a fixed period of time. Public cloud removes the need for that commitment. We pay by the hour for what we need, when we need it. It means there’s much more scope for experimentation, innovation and faster evolution in the services we provide. It means capacity management is no longer a factor when winning or losing business, and with complete automation of the build process, it means deploying an identical service for a new customer can take minutes rather than months, even when significant additional infrastructure is required.

Fundamentally, the use of public cloud means we can focus business capacity on the software and people that directly allow us to deliver new and better services to our customers, rather than having to continually manage and finance the lower layers of technical provision.  Public cloud is increasingly ready for the broadcast chain, and its time is coming.

Paul Markham, Head of Access Services Platform Architecture, Broadcast and Media Services