M+E Connections

Adobe, Teradici: How to Keep Content Secure in the Age of Hybrid Work

The upheaval that broadcasters, video editors and others in the media and entertainment sector experienced with the shift to remote work at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic may be behind us but, as hybrid work models mature and become the new normal, some challenges persist for content creators, according to Adobe and Teradici.

The shift to remote work “caught a lot of companies by surprise” and, over the last couple of years, “new processes have been put in [place] to move to a hybrid workflow, which is becoming the new norm,” Stephen Lyle, who manages strategic alliances and business development at Teradici, said Feb. 9 during the webinar “Keep Sensitive Broadcast & Video Content Secure in an Age of Hybrid Work.”

He started by highlighting what he said are “some of the challenges that we’ve seen [at] Teradici from COVID-19 and this general necessity to have users based at home and away from work.”

The shift caused many pain points for broadcasters and content creators, including lower-quality performance and productivity in content creation and increased cybersecurity risks, he said.

Hybrid workflows, however, have now become the new norm, he noted.

The Challenge of Remote Monitoring

“I think we can all agree there’s been some struggles,” according to David Helmly, head of strategic development, professional video for Cloud Edit at Adobe. “We’ve learned a lot along the way and some of those struggles certainly have to do with the type of workstations that people are used to running, maybe in their local edit suites or even in their home offices,” he said.

People have devices they paid for that they use as tools for their work and expect those devices to work, regardless of where they’re working from, Helmly pointed out. “So there’s constantly challenges to ensure that we meet that,” he said.

“Remote monitoring has been a challenge” in particular, said Helmly. “We’ve overcome a lot of this. But I think it’s going to be a challenge that’s going to continue to hit us as things change,” he said, noting there is also 4K resolution to deal with and now “8K is the new 4K.” High Dynamic Range (HDR), “I think, is going to be probably next on the docket,” he added.

Another challenge as a content creator is when the tech and the tools get in the way of the creative process, he pointed out.

Post-Pandemic Plans

Teradici interviewed 700 IT decision-makers to get their takes on what was happening with remote workflows and what their companies planned to do after the pandemic, Lyle noted.

While a lot of people have already moved to remote workflows, it’s tougher to do that in broadcasting, “where you have high-tech production and master control rooms… done remotely and the quality has to be top-level for that,” he said.

But you’re seeing a lot of other firms in the sector move to remote production, he noted.

And they are expected to continue doing that even after the pandemic ends, he said. Initially, the shift to remote work was done to prevent workforces from catching COVID-19, but companies have seen additional benefits also since then, he noted.

The main reason that those polled by Teradici said they expected the continued use of remote workflows post-pandemic was the improved job satisfaction that has been created by offering employees flexibility, with 68% of respondents citing that, according to the company. It was followed by improving productivity (52% of respondents), reducing the real estate footprint of their company’s headquarters (33%) and attracting fresh talent (23%), according to Lyle.

For all these reasons, people are expected to continue using this hybrid workflow model with users accessing their workstations and PCs remotely in many cases with the compute happening in a company data center or up in the cloud, he explained.

While it might make sense for the anchor desks of news networks to remain in the studio, post production people and creative teams can work from anywhere with the right tech platforms, he added.

The Hybrid Workflow of the Future

Turning to what we can expect down the road, Lyle said customers have requirements. “If they’re going to be moving their important and secure data out of their data center and into their user home environments, there has to be some key must haves there,” and they come under “four pillars”: security, flexibility, performance and management, he said.

Security, from the feedback that Teradici received in its study, was definitely the “number one priority, and it’s important that no data actually leaves the enterprise or the data center and the way we get around that obviously is by just scraping the pixels and having that encrypted data sent across the Internet,” he said.

“It’s a very secure way of providing that image at a high-performance, 4K high bit-rate level and it’s zero trust as well,” meaning you can never trust a user or device and will always be verifying to provide the highest security level, he added.

Flexibility was also a key requirement because Teradici customers want to use any workload or application remotely and have it delivered on any device, from any device in the remote home environment, he said. They also want the same performance quality as one gets in the office, he added.

Tech Trends in Broadcast Remote Work

Collaboration is seen as the most important issue when it comes to remote workflows in the broadcast sector, Helmly said.

Among the other trends are: audio and video synchronization, sustained high frame rates at 4K/Ultra High Definition resolutions and beyond, multi-channel audio, HDR color and peripheral integrations

“We are seeing a number of challenges… with multichannel audio” and the best way to address it, he pointed out, noting questions raised include what is the right way to do a mix-down, Helmly said.

Where do we go from here? Adobe is “focusing a lot on collaboration because that’s the part that’s missing in a lot of these remote workflows,” he went on to say.

Artificial intelligence is also playing a role, he said, noting Adobe, a day earlier, had announced new features in the latest release of Premiere Pro that the company said dramatically accelerate editorial workflows, including Remix, which uses Adobe Sensei to intelligently re-time music clips to match video content, and an updated Speech to Text, that can now be used offline, generating accurate transcriptions up to three times faster than before. Sensei is Adobe’s AI and machine learning platform.

3 Things to Know About Teradici CAS

Lyle went on to explain the benefits of Teradici Cloud Access Software (CAS), pointing to the three key things to know about it: the flexibility it provides, the security it offers and its high performance.

Based on the PCoIP protocol with AES 256 encryption, no data leaves the safety of a corporate network, he noted. Teradici CAS also enables remote access without a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and ensures employee and contractor data by having a secure connection between the host and endpoint device, according to Teradici.

Its flexibility, meanwhile, allows for any use case or any user, any host environment, any host operating system, and endpoint and any endpoint operating system, according to Teradici.

And in performance, Teradici CAS is: color accurate, lossless and distortion-free; offers low-latency peripheral support such as for Wacom devices; and it features intelligent auto-offload, which balances fidelity with system efficiency, according to Teradici.