Is public cloud really best bet for 
facilities looking to move to IaaS? 

Infrastructure as a service is undergoing a huge re-evaluation as the industry wakes up to the hidden costs of cloud-first workflows. Sure, they add power and flexibility to your facility, without increasing capex costs, but are all IaaS solutions created equal? We look at the differences between IaaS on the public and private cloud, and what they could mean for your facility... 

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the media industry embrace software as a service in order to provide the best possible experience for remote workers. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is the logical next step: hardware, including workstations, storage and networking components, is housed in a datacentre. End users use zero clients to log into a virtual machine that can be ‘remodelled’ on the fly to give them extra compute power, graphics capabilities and storage as needed; if you take on more staff, you can spin up extra virtual machines almost instantly, and spin them down again when peak demand is over. 

There are lots of IaaS providers out there, and many solutions use the same underlying technologies. But when it comes to choosing the right option for your facility, there’s one key question: is your provider using a public or private cloud? 

Private cloud ensures cost predictability

If your IaaS supplier is relying on a public cloud solution like AWS, they’re not actually in control of how much your usage costs you. 

Public cloud providers will charge upload, consumption and egress fees based on how much data you move through their system, so you can never know in advance what your costs for any given week, month or project will be. If a client asks you to upload more footage than expected or a producer leaves their virtual machine running over the weekend, you’ll incur extra costs – and many of the facilities we speak with don’t know how to ascertain which project incurred which cost, let alone how to pass them on to clients, so end up taking the financial hit themselves. 

Even if you have a preferential rate with a public cloud provider, or have found a supplier willing to absorb the occasional extra cost, neither of those agreements are fixed, long-term propositions. What do you do when fees increase and you can’t afford to egress terabytes of media to a more affordable platform? What happens if your supplier stops deciding to absorb fees for you? How do you prepare clients for either of these eventualities? 

Using IaaS in the private cloud is the best way around these issues. When you own your hardware and your IaaS supplier owns the location where its being hosted and virtualised, egress and consumption costs don’t apply, so there’s no variable cost to pass on. You simply pay for the capacity and connectivity you need, and then move as much material as you want using those resources. 

This means your costs are not only predictable month-to-month, they’re predictable for the medium-long term, and that means more accurate quoting and billing for you and your clients. 

Private cloud maximises the value of your existing hardware

Storage is a significant investment for any facility. If you’ve spent hundreds of thousands of pounds building out an on-premise production storage array, you’re going to want to sweat that asset before moving to storage as a service – but that means less flexibility, less scalability, and a compromised experience for your remote workers. 

If you’re using IaaS on the private cloud, it’s possible to relocate your existing storage to a datacentre and incorporate it into the cloud array your end users access under an IaaS model.

OK, this ‘bring your own storage’ model means you have to deal with the logistics of relocation, but there’s no ingest cost, you pay for less cloud storage capacity overall, and the assets you’ve invested in can continue to generate value for the rest of their usable life.

Which leads us to another key point: if you’re working with a private cloud provider, both they and you know a lot more about your data’s location than a public cloud service would.

Private cloud ensures data sovereignty (and better support)

When we host infrastructure for our clients, it’s in our UK datacentre. We know where it is. Our maintenance team check on it regularly, and our engineers can get their hands on your hardware fast if any issues arise. When you pick up the phone, you know you’ll be talking to someone who understands your system. 

This isn’t necessarily the case with public cloud providers, whose sheer scale means that identifying, retrieving and replacing faulty hardware is more arduous and service has to be less personalised. It’s also harder to keep track of data that’s “somewhere in a cloud” rather than “stored in our private cloud, at this location” – and therefore much less enticing for clients who have strict data sovereignty requirements. 

Private cloud ensures parity of access

Another advantage to using the private cloud is that you’re less likely to run up against conflicting vendor partnerships. Avid may want their virtual machines to run on Azure and other vendors may insist on AWS, which means it’s difficult to deliver parity of access for both pools of users, or to share assets between the two. 

With a private cloud based on virtualised storage you and your provider own, rather than proprietary public cloud storage, it’s far easier to deliver and integrate different platforms as your users and clients require. As long as you have the appropriate software licences, private cloud solutions have far more leeway to create virtualised environments that grease the wheels of collaboration without violating the user terms of your licences.

Is the private cloud right for you? 

While a private cloud IaaS solution isn’t for everyone, it does offer several key advantages that will be make or break for some users. If you’re considering virtualising your operations, adopting a hybrid or cloud-first workflow, or looking for a full IaaS solution, it would be a mistake to rule private cloud options out completely.

And really, that’s down to one thing: the fact that private cloud IaaS solutions won’t just scale with you, they’ll grow and develop as you do. Our offering is evolving as we learn more about our customers’ needs and find new, more efficient ways to deliver the functionality they receive. Because the private cloud allows us to be agile and iterative when it comes to providing and scaling new solutions, our customers can work that way too, adapting as they develop, safe in the knowledge that their hardware, data and licencing is all being taken care of by someone with detailed knowledge of their systems.

Want to know more about how we use private cloud? Learn more about IaaS from Jigsaw24 Media here or get in touch with the team using the form below. Alternatively, email media@Jigsaw24.com or call 03332 409 210.