On-Premise Recording and Streaming Makes Its Move to the Cloud

While many organizations, small and large, have begun to move as many services as possible to the cloud, so begins the move of their collaboration platform of choice.  While moving services such as documents and data began first and are an easier migration, moving video services to the cloud has been a bit slower.   However the last few years have seen an emergence of many top tier cloud video collaboration providers, making a transition from on-premise equipment and services more worthwhile.   As this shift gains more momentum there is one key collaboration component that is poised to make it’s leap to the cloud along with the rest; recording and streaming services.

There are many players in the recording and streaming space when it comes to video conferencing in enterprise.  Likely the most notable is Cisco, with their Telepresence Content Server which came in the acquisition of Tandberg in 2009 and allowed users to dial an address to begin recording (and eventually streaming) video calls .  Cisco has not made any major updates to TCS in years and has announced end-of-life..  

Additional players in the space include but are not limited to Polycom, with the RealPresence Media Suite as well as Lifesize, Qumu and Vbrick.  However many providers do not offer cloud solutions at this time or are very early in their deployments, providing only limited cloud capability without requiring the customer to add on-premise equipment.

Why put Recording and Streaming in the Cloud?

The benefits of moving to the cloud have been increasingly clear.  Flexibility, ease of scale, mobility, and less overhead are a few key factors out of many for migrating just about any business component away from on-premise.  In terms of recording and streaming specifically storage is a major factor.  As cameras and video technology improves, video files sizes are growing.  Socially we have become more media centric and are creating more content than ever.  Combine these two factors and storage capacity can disappear at an alarming rate .  Why worry about continuously expanding the hardware storage in your data center when your cloud provider can do this for you?  This is a big savings on gear and time spent on ordering, installing and maintaining it all.  The ability to receive new features and services without having to worry about upgrades is a big plus as well.

In addition, playback and viewing of live streams of video meetings has naturally become more cloud-centric.  In years past, most employees worked within the office and joined all-hands meetings in person or in connected conference rooms.  These days the work force is dispersed and we all expect to be able to view recordings and streams on mobile.  In the past this kind of viewing would have required a VPN connection back to the office among many other technical barriers.  Today it makes sense that this function live in the cloud as it provides better ease of access for an increasingly mobile population.   Let your provider handle storage, distribution, accessibility, and more so your IT staff can focus on more important things than maintaining a complicated network of on-premise servers connected to content delivery networks.

Feature	On-Premise	Cloud
Encryption of recording and streaming sessions	✓	✓
Record from any device or platform	Depends	✓
Record out of the office while on the go	Depends	✓
Simple user creation and account management	Depends	✓
Easy scalability		✓
Automatic, worry-free backup		✓
Easy, secure, distributed delivery without additional assistance and cost from  a CDN		✓
Automatic updates and rollouts of new features		✓
Total cost of ownership	High (opex and capex)	Low (opex only

 

Recording and Streaming Cost of Ownership

This is a major factor when considering a move of recording and streaming services to the cloud.  Let’s do a quick breakdown.  

Hardware Costs

Mentioned above, if your recording and streaming services are on premise, you’ll likely need multiple physical servers, especially for proper distribution across remote offices.  The bigger the and more distributed the deployment, the more servers you need.  This takes up rack space in your DC, requires power and cooling, but more impactfully, requires disaster recovery in place for backups and the possibility of server failure.  

Staff Costs

Servers don’t run themselves.  You’ll need an IT person (or people) to manage all the above hardware as well as run upgrades and maintenance in an on-prem scenario.  You’ll need to watch out for things like capacity and storage and plan routine hardware refreshes to keep up. Normally these tasks fall on your network team or similar group, and don’t you pay these teams to do more important things like keep your network up and running?    

The Streaming Element

Streaming is becoming less of a nice to have and more of a requirement these days.  On-premise streaming deployments are often complex and take up a lot of time of your network team and other IT staff.  Managing the servers and network support to ensure a successful livestream is a huge time suck.  You can leverage a CDN for this but this is also time spent and more cost on top of your on-premise costs .

It is clear that there is big savings in moving recording and streaming services to the cloud. These savings can be seen not just in your budget but in freeing valuable time of your staff to focus on more important tasks.  

Recording and Streaming: Integrated vs Standalone?

Some collaboration cloud services have native recording & streaming functionality while others don’t.  If these services are important to you it makes sense to use a standalone recording and streaming service like REC.VC. This allows you to record from any device or platform.  With today’s volatile and ever improving collaboration market, it might take a few tries to find a service that properly fits the way your business operates.  Imagine having to switch or update your collaboration and having to learn and acclimate to a new recording platform along with everything else?  With REC.VC you can continue to record and live stream regardless of the collaboration platform or devices you’re using.  Agility at it’s best.

Recorded Content Control: One Platform vs. Many

With the increasing amount of collaboration tools emerging, businesses will often find employees using a multitude of non-company-standard apps and services, sometimes with overlapping features.   Recording often falls into this category.  This can be a huge complication.  Competing services regularly have vastly different practices when it comes to recording.  Some have different file formats, many require users to save recordings on their laptops while some could be stored on an unsecured server somewhere.  This can become a real mess when you have company recordings spread all over the place and users with company issued computers running out of space on their hard drives or needing video files converted to other formats,  subsequently calling IT for assistance.   A cloud solution ensures all your recordings are secured in one place, no matter what device is used to create the content, all easily retrieved and accessible from any device while removing many troublesome IT obstacles.

In conclusion, it is somewhat of a surprise that most recording and streaming services were not cloud ready, and adopted sooner.  The benefits are many: increased mobility and ease of use for users, device and platform agnostic usage, easier deployment and management, lower overhead and associated costs in hardware and IT support, content control, and lots of flexibility.  The good news is that a robust, feature-rich, simple recording and streaming solution  is ready for you in the cloud with REC.VC.  Make your move today.

Posted in Live Streaming, Recording Tagged with: content server, media suite, recording, streaming