Is the cloud really as green or cost-friendly as widely thought?

When it comes to video production, cloud solutions may contribute significantly to energy consumption.

The cloud is widely proposed as the latest solution for at least three key media and business applications, including: Storage as a service (STaaS), Software as a service (SaaS) and Processing as a service.

In production and broadcast environments, all three applications are sometimes seen as viable answers to the needs of a fast-paced media production center. Even so, it’s the storage as a service product that is seeing the early application in the video production arena.

Storage as a service (STaaS)

Some common commercial products of STaaS include Instagram, DropBox and Carbonite. Professional STaaS services are available from Amazon (Amazon S3), Microsoft (SkyDrive) and EMC (Atmos), among others. All of these products do pretty much the same thing — you upload your data, and the company stores it. The services rely on users with a standard desktop, laptop or even a thin client to access to the data. If your application needs to store Exabytes of data these services can be helpful and inexpensive.

With storage costs dropping, one might ask why not build your own storage application and house the data on-site. The other side of that same coin is, “Why bother? Let someone else handle the data.” There are several reasons, both pro and con, to storing data locally. Among reasons to store data locally, doing so offers security, fast transfer and full control. On the other hand, using an off-site provider potentially lowers operational costs, means no hardware upgrades or system management and allows for access from anywhere. A long debate can be had on each of the above points, but we will let them serve as their own basis for discussion over this series of articles.