M+E Europe

At the 6th Dec  Content Protection Summit (CPS), the Media & Entertainment Data Center Alliance (MEDCA) touted the key role that Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) systems can play in risk management within the sector during the panel session “DCIM for Risk Management in M&E Operations.”

Imagine facility security and health alerts on your watch, monitoring the stage’s digital infrastructure and notifying you of a pending back-up failure or power outage.

DCIM systems centrally monitor, measure, manage and control the security and health of a facility’s digital infrastructure, from WiFi, storage and servers to power, cooling and security access and more.

M&E companies including ARRI are already introducing DCIM products of their own, providing fault-finding information to staff located anywhere in the world. Panellists during the CPS session discussed how DCIM systems can support virtual and traditional production operations if they were more widely adopted.

The goal is “to find out how … risk management and digital infrastructure intersect,” according to moderator Eric Rigney, MEDCA EVP.

So why did DCIM systems come along to begin with, Joe Reele, VP, Solution Architects at Schneider Electric, asked rhetorically and answered: “DCIM came along because there was a lot of people running around with clipboards with their hair on fire trying to figure out what was going on and we started to use digital sensors and things to make sense and now this very complicated world became a little bit easier for all of us to manage.”

Explaining why DCIM systems have become increasingly useful in the M&E sector, Sean Tajkowski, MEDCA technical director, said: “Now we’re starting to see connected stages and now we’re starting to see assets from multiple places all network together or [collaborate]. And now it’s important that you have a dashboard view on your reliance across the entire platform rather than just locally here at home. You want us to have something that’s centralized as a network operations center of your own to be able to look at that across the board and … globally.”

Sectors have been using DCIM systems the most so far have included banking, insurance and social media, noted Lisa Griffin, MEDCA executive director.

“So it seems to us at MEDCA that the rest of the digital world understands the importance of systems such as a DCIM and “yet we don’t see it too much in our area,” she said.

Tajkowski noted that DCIM systems have become increasingly important in the M&E sector amid the rise of virtual production. “That’s one example of where we’re even seeing it all the way down to a production set level.”

Jim Weinheimer, director of solutions engineering at Virtual Power Systems,  pointed to the significant role that DCIM systems play around security.

“A lot of the tools nowadays have security built in and for the data centers themselves, we’re talking about certifications and audits all the time for credit ]card payment processing [and] healthcare protected information,” Weinheimer said.

He added: “Being able to integrate those processes and to be able to pass audits so that you can host data that is protected” and DCIM systems are helping companies run “audits efficiently and make sure that the people who are in the data center who are accessing the data are supposed to have access to the data and all of the people who are in the data center are supposed to be there accessing the physical system…. So all of these systems tie together now, and you can interface [with] them so that the people who are supposed to be on set, the people who are supposed to be in the processing facilities that are on set – they’re the people who are allowed to touch that data, and you can control where that data goes.”

The concern for companies is that “if you don’t have control of that data, who’s walking away with your footage?” he pointed out, adding: “It’s not like a spool of film used to be where it’s kind of hard to hide under your coat.” It’s much easier to walk out the door with data today and then “transmit that anywhere, and that would be completely disruptive to your businesses,” he added.

Presented by Fortinet and produced by MESA, CDSA’s Content Protection Summit is sponsored by Convergent Risks, Richey May Technology Solutions, GeoComply, Signiant, Verimatrix, Shift Media, EIDR and EZDRM.