How to Protect Your Cloud Assets

When it comes to the management of digital assets like those used to create marketing materials, organizations typically face a number of challenges at the same time.

For starters, when everything is stored on a series of disparate systems, employees spend more time looking for valuable collateral than they do actually deriving value from it. Not only that, but it's difficult to protect something if you're not entirely sure where it is located. Key stakeholders also have a hard time understanding where something is in the production process due to an unfortunate lack of visibility.

Thankfully, cloud-based asset management systems are a viable way to address all of these problems, all at the exact same time. They bring with them an enormous number of advantages, all of which are more than worth a closer look.

Significance of Cloud-based Assets

Cloud assets are important for a wide range of different reasons. Perhaps the most important is the fact that they're available anywhere, at any time, and from virtually any device - something that the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us is critical for a business’s success.

When everything regarding video production is stored in the cloud, employees are free to be just as productive at home as they can be in the office. This also essentially future proofs the organization, making them less susceptible to unexpected disruptions like the pandemic.

Not only that, but media assets like photos, videos, audio clips, and finished collateral can also be better protected in the cloud than they can be if they were being stored locally. If everything was being stored on a server in an office somewhere, there's always the possibility that this hardware could crash - taking every last kilobyte of data right along with it. It could be damaged in a fire or some type of other disaster or even stolen in a robbery.

When all pivotal information is being stored in the cloud, these types of issues are outright eliminated - allowing organizational leadership to rest easy knowing that everything they've worked so hard to create is safe, regardless of the situation.

Why Cloud Asset Protection Is Important?

Protecting cloud-based assets for video production is absolutely necessary for a number of important reasons. For starters, a lot of the assets that you're talking about are likely proprietary - they're the images, videos, audio clips, and other elements that you've created to best reflect your business or brand. That needs to be safeguarded to help cement your competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Of course, cloud-based protection works the other way, too. It's not just about preventing these elements from falling into the wrong hands. You also need to make sure that they're kept safe in the cloud to prevent incorrect edits, poor changes, and accidental deletions. In other words, protecting your assets is about both preserving them for the future and putting yourself in a position to extract the maximum amount of value from them - which in and of itself is the most important benefit of all.

Essential Steps to Protect Your Cloud Assets

In order to establish the right plan to protect your cloud-based video production assets, there are a number of key things to keep in mind. Chief among these is a thorough and regular review of the shared responsibility model.

Thanks to the architecture of the cloud, it's possible to limit access to certain resources to only those who need elements like images and videos to do their jobs. Anybody who doesn't expressly need to be able to work with certain collateral won't be able to view it at all - thus eliminating the possibility of issues like human error.

Of course, this requires that you establish controls that meet your security objectives. You need to first take stock of exactly what you're storing and where. You need to know where certain high-value video production assets reside. Then, you'll be able to put together a plan that allows for the free flow of information in a way that still protects those investments as much as possible.

This goes hand-in-hand with the implementation of identity and access management requirements. There are certain positions within your business that will need access to everything, while other positions may only need access to portions of your total asset database. Understanding who needs what, when, and why is the key to coming up with a plan that offers an adequate level of protection while still empowering the way that people like and need to work.

All of this can be enforced via host-based security controls, meaning that system administrators have complete visibility into all activity that is taking place within the system. If something changes, there is a virtual "paper trail" that shows what happened and when - all so that you can either reverse mistakes or get additional insight into why certain actions were taken.

It's important to note that cloud security posture management solutions should also be considered, all in the name of generating a real-time level of visibility into the status of your assets moving forward.

In the End

In the modern era, creative cloud-based assets are the foundation upon which many businesses are built. They're more than just images, videos, and sound clips. They come together to form the critical impression that people have when they encounter your brand for the first time.

Because of that, they need to be protected at all costs. This is also why a cloud-based asset management system is so fundamentally important. In addition to helping keep everything in one place so that people don't have to spend too much time searching for that which they need, these solutions also offer a superior level of security and generate an almost unprecedented level of visibility into the process at the exact same time. This, coupled with the way that they make collaboration from anywhere at anytime easier, make them an investment that is well worth it for most organizations.

To find out additional information about how to protect your media assets, or to get answers to any other questions that you might have, please don't hesitate to contact the team at ProMAX today.