Extracting ongoing value from bulging data sets requires a rethink of archiving strategy
As data sets grow in both size and importance to organisational success, there are parallel escalations in risk around managing, and preserving it. Ensuring this data tsunami is secured, available, and compliant with increasingly complex regulatory obligations, isn’t getting easier.
These are realities NEXTDC partner, MediaHub Australia recognised early through its association with some of Australia’s largest media and communications organisations. By leveraging existing expertise, and its partnership with NEXTDC, MediaHub set out to ease common customer information management headaches by developing a more flexible approach to storage services that enables their customers to meet the resilience, security, and accessibility challenges that come with growing data loads.
Data everywhere
As cloud migration accelerates, it becomes imperative for organisations to keep their data mass, and the infrastructure supporting it, intimately interconnected. Data is an organisation’s most valuable resource, forming the critical backbone for decision making. Therefore, data integrity and accessibility are critical for organisations to extract the full value of the intelligence it represents.
According to MediaHub CEO, Alan Sweeney, the management of data and how it’s used requires innovative thinking about storage to mitigate escalating challenges around availability, sovereignty, redundancy, and disaster recovery.
“Digital transformation is about moving to flexible, always-on architecture,” says Alan. “Ensuring you can extract maximum value from data assets requires the same sort of elastic approach we see with infrastructure and connectivity services.
“Solutions that provide the right balance between deep archive, data durability and keeping it accessible for new analysis, is what creates genuine business value.”
Cashing in on the gold
According to MediaHub, the days when it was okay to bury historical data in a public cloud platform’s deep archive service for safe storage and regulatory compliance reasons are gone.
“Data is well understood to be an organisation’s most valuable asset,” Alan says. “It holds business intelligence that helps shape future strategy.
“Machine learning and easy access to virtual processing power means there are always new opportunities to keep diving back into data pools, looking for trends and opportunities that can inform and advance organisational priorities.
The flexibility alternative
In launching a new private cloud-based data management solution called ArkHub, MediaHub is striking balance between deep archiving and accessibility. It provides guarantees around data durability by building a bullet-proof agnostic solution that is also self-healing. It features fully redundant connectivity and hardware architecture targeting “14 nines” of data protection – 100% of which is located in Australia.
ArkHub is managed via MediaHub’s own private dark fibre infrastructure and points of presence in NEXTDC’s data centres. In order to deliver its ArkHub services, MediaHub partnered with NEXTDC to help them overcome several key challenges:
Key challenges:
Interconnectivity – MediaHub’s core elastic, virtual network needs to reach all major metropolitan and regional centres plus have global connections.
Resilience – Uptime, redundancy, back-up, and disaster recovery planning are critical success factors when trying to build a solution that manages large volumes of data in real time.
Security – MediaHub’s clients prioritise the highest levels of protection around their data, and they understand data security starts with physical security.
Scalability and flexibility – Rapid growth in both customers and data volumes makes the ability to continue quickly adding new infrastructure and systems where and when they are needed.
Affordable access to archived data – Traditional deep archive services are generally accompanied by ingress and egress fees making revisiting large datasets cost prohibitive.
Easing data management headaches
MediaHub is no stranger to effectively managing large volumes of data. Competencies developed in servicing enormous data volumes trafficked and stored for broadcast media are now increasingly relevant to a broader range of organisations.
ArkHub was conceived, developed, and brought to market to meet this demand, but it needed a trusted data centre partner to meet current needs and enable them to scale with future growth.
Foundations of success
MediaHub’s success is founded upon supporting customers’ data feeds from any location with appropriate security, resilience and performance metrics required for broadcasting.
MediaHub supports the data carriage and indexing for Australia’s largest media organisations; both traditional broadcast organisations and now streaming services looking for the ultimate customer experience.
“The media industry has evolved a lot over the last 10 years but the need for high performance connectivity, data durability and logical indexing for easy accessibility is a constant,” Sweeney said. “There are many transforming industries that can learn from the way broadcast media organisations have been managing and maintaining their data assets for decades.
Partnering for success
NEXTDC’s facilities represent critical components in MediaHub’s service delivery. They provide the interconnection points for customer data transfer, an ecosystem of complementary service providers and the critical secured, powered, and cooled environments that house storage and network infrastructure assets.
“We have total faith in the resilience and security of NEXTDC’s services,” adds Alan. “The quality of NEXTDC’s facilities aligns perfectly with our values. Never having to worry about the core infrastructure critical to our objectives allows us to stay focused on supporting dynamic customer needs.
“It means we stay focused on innovation and developing new initiatives like ArkHub and getting them to market quickly. Equally it enables us to seamlessly scale up our systems and interconnection requirements as we bring on new customers.”
