Transcript
JONATHAN MORGAN
Object Matrix is a software company based in Cardiff. We make data storage solutions for the media industry. The data storage solutions typically are purchased by the companies that use them, be that a broadcaster, a post-production company, a stadium, just basically anyone with a media workflow. And digital data is huge and growing. More and more cameras, more and more things being filmed. They need to be able to store media libraries and what they're making.
Data, in our case, quite often is media data. So that could be video. Of course, once upon a time was on film. Of course, now, it's digital. It's data. And that gets stored into our solutions. Asset management is how do you handle all of that video? How do you find what you need to be able to find to make your production? How do you recall from a media library and news event that happened years ago? All of these things come into our solution and the usage of the solution.
Asset management is several things. But maybe the one that is most commonly used is just finding your video. You may have hundreds or even thousands of hours of video, and you need to be able to find that quickly. Maybe you're making a new programme, and you need to take an insert from another video and put that in the video that you're making. Or it could just be that you are a user, a customer, if you like, of a video on-demand service, and you want to be able to find a video to play a film.
All of these things involve search. So, asset management at the core level is search. It goes on from there and can be about the whole production process at a broadcast or a post-production house or anywhere else for that matter.
Good data management benefits organisations because you can find your data quicker. And you can do more intelligence, for instance, searching, in order to be able to find the asset that you need. Maybe there's a level of artificial intelligence in there that allows you to home in on the exact video and the clip of the video that you want to find. There's a lot that you can do with good data searching, in order to make the editors and the users of that data much more efficient.
The cloud is a very strange concept. And maybe over the years, people have got a little bit confused, because some people think the cloud is just some magic place you push data to, and you get data from. But really, it's someone else's computer. It's a physical device that lives somewhere and is managed by a company.
The cloud can be the public cloud. It can be one of the huge, big-four cloud vendors that we have all heard of. But the cloud could also be a private cloud, maybe a cloud of computers that are managed, in order to provide a service for an individual company or for a small group of companies. There are many clouds – public, private, on-premises, in the customers premises, hybrid. There are many types of cloud.
Object Matrix makes a scalable storage solution that is a cloud in its own way, because it manages itself and allows our customers to be able to keep their data in a scalable, secure way. There are several different ways this is used in reality. Some customers, they have a small system on premises. Some customers have portable systems even. And other customers have very large, managed storage solutions that are managed even by ourselves, and are used like a public cloud.
The key things that organisations should be thinking about when managing data are, how can I reduce the time that I am spending managing my data because I want to do the things that my company does, not manage data? They want to be thinking about security because, absolutely, they do not want to have a hack or a loss of data, either through a malicious act, or maybe a hardware failure, or these types of things.
And then thirdly, how do I make that data work with all of the other applications, software, and other ways that need to use that data and the users that need to use that data. So, the usability of the data, the security of the data, and I want to not be managing that data myself.
Data governance of something like a media asset library is very, very important. Governance to some people means regulations, rules, if you like. When data is accessed, who can access that data? Is that access audited? What can they do with that data when they get that data? Can they read it? Can they change it? Can they delete it even? So, there are many aspects of governance that you want to have with a very important, potentially very valuable, media data set.
If the software can help to enable those governance rules, you've won half the battle. And then if the software is very good, it makes it very simple and straightforward for the organisation to keep the data in a safe and secure manner, that's what we're trying to enable for organisations and enabling through the software set that we provide.
The main principle of security is only authorised people should be accessing that data. They really shouldn't be allowing people, who, for malicious reasons or just for privacy reasons, shouldn't be accessing the data. People want to see media libraries for whatever reason. It could be media library that's kept by a broadcaster, and somebody wants to access that. Security is really important on large data sets and, particularly, in the media industry.
When people are working with offline media, that could be several different things, depending on the organisation. But with the organisations we work with, perhaps a production has been made, somebody has been filmed. And that film has been sent to an editor to work on. And in the past, always you would see that editor go to the office and work on the data, on the media, on the video, in the office.
Nowadays, there's more and more remote working. So, you might see that video being sent to the editor to work on in their home. There are huge security considerations nowadays when you start to think about this world of working from home. Some of those security considerations might be just who is going to be able to see that? Can someone else in the house – in the household – see the data that the editor is working on? Is that data being kept securely? Is it just being left on a coffee table and could be picked up by anyone who comes into the house?
The security aspects that you can keep tight control of in the office, sometimes they're a little bit harder to keep control of as video is sent around to different households.
Media can and has been leaked. That is very much a fact. There have been plotlines that have sneaked into the public sphere from major movie productions just because of home working. And people seeing what's happening. There are leaks that have happened because data storage devices have been hacked. And they have gone out into the wild. And sometimes, they've gone out into the wild, and they've been put onto a YouTube equivalent. Or sometimes, it's ransomware or ransomed. We're going to release this unless you pay us some money Mr. Film Production Company. So, leaks absolutely happen, and security is, of course, incredibly important for valuable data.
One approach that you can take with using media data is called a zero-trust approach. In the zero trust, what you are saying is it's very hard for an organisation to say that person's home environments are safe. Their Wi-Fi is secure. Their devices don't have other applications running on them. They don't have a telephone in the home that's connected the same Wi-Fi as their laptop.
So effectively, you're saying that the environments that the data has been accessed from cannot be trusted, not as much as you can from the office, for instance. So, you take a zero-trust approach on the data. You firewall, you sandbox where the media data is being kept. And you very much control what can access that data at a very granular level. That's a zero-trust approach. You're basically giving up on, I can secure every single aspect, but you're very tightly controlling just the data.
A post-production house that we are very aware of, and is multinational, was hacked very badly going back a few years. And actually, the hackers were reputedly a country hacking into that post-production company. They hacked every single system in that post-production company. Once they were through the firewalls, they were able to get to all of the data in the company.
And, even to the extent where, they took away the computers, they reloaded the operating systems, and they found the hacks were coming back because the hackers had put the hacks into the firmware of the computers that had been hacked. That post-production company, the only systems that weren't hacked in there were the systems with zero trust, because they actually didn't trust on the overall firewall of the company. They had their own firewall that had to be breached. So, they didn't trust other computers in the same network that they were in to be safe.
And that's why zero trust is so important. And that was a very specific case where the systems that were provided there with zero trust actually withstood a very serious hack.
When the pandemic hit, we saw a huge amount of trust being transferred from the management to the workforce. And in the main, the workforce has absolutely 100% responded by delivering the level of quality of work and the level of amounts of work that they always did when they were in the office. And that's been an amazing thing to see.
In the office, of course, you're there, you're seeing them, you're helping them, hopefully, to achieve their aims. When they're working from home, yes, there is an element of trust there. Yes, there is an element of not being able to watch them on every minute of the day. But actually, the results of the work, and the results are in every meeting that we have, and the quality of the work that they deliver.