Mind the security gap

Broadcasters and studios need to keep changing and innovating in order to be competitive. It’s about upgrading, adopting new technologies and work practices, and ultimately, transforming the media ecosystem to better embrace digital transformation.

But transformation is not without its responsibilities – and none is more important than the obligation to meet and maintain security best practice.

Piracy costs the media industry billions of dollars

Media is an industry that is under constant threat of cyberattack. Illegal streaming and pirating have plagued the industry since the inception of the internet. Forbes.com estimates that last year alone there were 153 billion pirated views of American TV and studio content. The cost to the industry could be as high as $71 billion – that’s a lot of lost jobs.

It’s completely understandable that the industry places paramount emphasis on security. But how do you make something secure if the technology is new?

Much has been done over the past few years, with the main cloud providers, security experts and media industry specialists working hand-in-hand to secure cloud-based and cloud-enabled workflows. But it’s still a work in progress. The ultimate benefit to the industry will be the ability to take advantage of the scalability of cloud networks, in order to be able to make more content and distribute it at a lower cost.

Emerging businesses and technologies need security standards

For an emerging business like Overcast HQ, cutting through the noise when it comes to security can be a challenge. From an early stage, we took the decision to partner with both AWS and Microsoft Azure to leverage the security work they were doing with the media industry. To that end, we have worked alongside organisations large and small to develop secure workflows.

But it hasn’t been easy. Media industry technology has been fragmenting for years. There are multiple streaming solutions, multiple video file formats, multiple metadata conventions and, as you might expect, multiple security protocols.

The reality on the ground is that the real-life practice to date when contracting with global media and entertainment brands has been to present a number of certificates and policies in order to satisfy security needs. But there has always been a gap – a gap that naturally occurs when technology evolves. And there can be no gaps when it comes to security.

Filling the security gap

The DPP Committed to Security programme is an industry-led initiative that is helping to fill the gap between broadcast and cloud technologies as they merge. And it’s for that reason that we decided to take part in the programme. The industry is at a key turning point, where editing and playout are finally moving to the cloud. Standards around processes, workflows and platforms are being debated daily. And the one constant that is forever part of the discussion is security.

The DPP’s Committed to Security programme is designed to provide guidelines for innovators in the media industry to be able to embrace digital transformation. The programme outlines the minimum level of security mature organisations and products should meet.

Participation in the programme has provided us with a structured approach to evaluating our organisational and product maturity from a security perspective. It has enabled us to engage with customer security professionals as part of their third party security risk assessments and has been a great starting point for considering other international standards based security assessment programmes.