The media and entertainment industry’s core business is selling on-demand videos, music, and streaming content. Media & Entertainment (M&E) companies can leverage Alkira Cloud Area Networking, build a secure multi-cloud/multi-region cloud network for customers, and enhance customer experience by providing fast and reliable access to content.
Let’s look at some of the Media and Entertainment Industry challenges:
Unpredictable Demand
The media and entertainment industry customers are very demanding and unpredictable. The viewership of any content can dynamically change; it may spike or surge based on the new content produced by the entertainment or the news broadcast by the media industry.
Agility & Time to Market
The Media and Entertainment industry needs to stay competitive and continue to produce original and high-quality content at a fast pace and affordable price.
User Experience
Content availability and performance in terms of quality and streaming are critical for the M&E customer’s and advertiser’s experience. The high quality of video content and on-demand live streaming with minimum to no buffering on the customer’s end is critical for the M & E industry.
Figure 1: Media and Entertainment Native Cloud Architecture Example
Technical Requirements
High Throughput & Bandwidth
Viewership’s dynamic behavior on any live streaming content or news requires dealing with the on-demand network throughput scale requirement in real-time and ensuring it is cost-efficient for the M&E industry.
Storage Management
Providing a huge collection of content to all the end users 24/7 mean dealing with big data. The huge amount of data requires the M&E industry to manage big data storage and access it quickly on consumers’ demand.
Latency
Resource-intensive activities may compromise the quality of video and on-demand live streaming hence affecting user experience. This means the M & E industry needs to build a network which is able to handle the on-demand throughput and bandwidth requirements at the same time they need to provide easy access to the content with minimum delay.
Highly Available Network
The high-performance demand from consumers and advertisers forces the M&E to build a low-latency and highly available network so that the M & E industry is able to meet the requirement of providing the content 24/7.
Overlapping CIDR
The merger and acquisition is very common in the Media and Entertainment industry hence creating a problem dealing with overlapping CIDRs in the network.
Alkira Solution for M&E Industry
Alkira Cloud Area Networking is the first global unified multi-cloud network delivered as-a-service. Alkira seamlessly solves all the media and entertainment’s network requirements and challenges mentioned above. Alkira allows M&E customers to quickly onboard their on-premise infrastructure by leveraging various methods, including AWS Direct Connect, Azure Express Routes, and IPsec/SD-WAN Connections from their DCs, or the retail stores into the Alkira Cloud Exchange Points. At the same time, customers also connect their cloud workloads (VPCs, VNETs) to the Alkira Cloud Exchange Points achieving seamless high-bandwidth multi-cloud connectivity for their applications. Alkira’s solution also allows customers who would like to inspect the traffic between on-premise to cloud or multi-cloud environments to use a policy-driven framework to inspect traffic as per the requirements.
Figure 2: Alkira Cloud Area Networking for M&E Applications
The above architecture diagram shows a high-level topology for a typical M&E company leveraging Alkira Cloud Area Networking. Branch offices, data center/ colocation would build connectivity into the Alkira CXP using private connections like Direct Connect or Express Route or IPsec connections, or SD-WAN connections on the on-premises side. The connections will be from the VPCs/VNETs where the business applications exist on the cloud side. These VPC/VNETs will build connectivity to the CXP. Once this is completed, end-to-end connectivity is established between the on-premises and cloud environments.
Another feature here is the internet-facing application used for M&E application access from any user on the internet, and that traffic is being inspected through the FW hosted in the Alkira CXP. Customers can also choose to inspect traffic using the firewall as per their requirements using Alkira’s policy-driven framework.
Alkira Solution Benefits
High Bandwidth
Alkira provides the benefits of High BW connectivity to cloud applications from on-prem, Customers can scale up and down based on their traffic requirements. This can help for users trying to access large video files.
Latency
Customers can connect to the Alkira CXP in the nearest region depending on where the applications exist and then leverage Alkira Backbone to have low latency while connecting to these applications. This can help for users connecting to these services for viewing content.
Overlapping IP addresses
Alkira solution provides extensive NAT capabilities which can help to solve the requirement for overlapping ip addresses. The solution provides the granularity to match on required conditions and then add NAT. In case of any M&A activities customers can leverage this capability to have seamless connectivity from their environments to the cloud applications or vice versa.
High availability and Redundancy
Alkira infrastructure is highly resilient and redundant and can spread across multiple regions and availability across multiple clouds. This will allow the streaming service and content providers to meet their critical SLA requirements.
Seamless Firewall Integration
Alkira provides seamless integration with vendors like Fortinet, Check Point, and Palo Alto for traffic inspection for any type of traffic flow. Financial companies get a significant advantage as they don’t have to bring up firewalls depending on traffic flow. Also, functionality like autoscaling comes as part of the solution, which helps to scale up or down depending on the requirements.
For more details, please refer to this blog about multi-cloud inline traffic inspection.
Automation with Terraform
Network Infrastructure at a large scale requires automation and Alkira helps to solve this wherein the customer can use terraform to provision the infrastructure for Alkira.
Conclusion
Alkira Cloud Area Networking infrastructure provides retail companies with an easy and secure solution with all the regulatory compliance requirements.
Reach out and schedule a demo today to learn more about how Alkira can help simplify cloud area networking for your organization. You can also try our Cloud Insights tool for free, giving instant inventory and insights into your cloud networking resources.
Ahmed Abeer is a Sr. Product Manager at Alkira, where he is responsible for building a best-in-class Multi-Cloud Networking and Security Product. He has been in Product Management for more than ten years in different big and small organizations. He has worked with large enterprise and service provider customers to enable LTE/5G MPLS network infrastructure, automate Layer 3 Data Center, enable Next-Gen Multi-Cloud architecture, and define customers’ Multi-Cloud strategies. Ahmed’s technical expertise in Cloud Computing and Layer 2/Layer 3 network technologies. Ahmed is a public speaker at various conferences & forums and holds a Master’s Degree in Computer Engineering
Deepesh Kumar is a Solutions Architect and product specialist in the computer networking industry with over 8 years of experience. He currently works as part of the post sales team at Alkira and focuses on working with customers to design and deploy the Alkira solution. Prior to working here, he worked at Viptela which was acquired by Cisco Systems. He holds a masters degree from San Jose State University.
