The Record - Issue 21: Summer 2021

106 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om F E ATUR E difficult task. The South African media company had planned the migration for a single three-day holiday weekend, with extensions beyond that window likely to pose a risk to the company’s pub- lishing operations, including newspapers, maga- zines and digital media. Microsoft Consulting Services helped the company move training and migration guidance to a virtual environment, implement best practices for adoption and change management and create Power BI dashboards to keep executives informed, among other tasks. “We thought Microsoft Consulting Services was essential to this project before the pandemic blew up our plans,” says Tobie Vermeulen, chief information officer of Media24, in a Microsoft story about the project. “After that, there was no way we would consider doing this without Microsoft. The migration to a new tenant paves the way for a much broader transformation for an increasingly digital world at Media24. It gives us a clean slate to implement best practices for security so we can use Azure and the internet in more innovative ways while keeping our infra- structure and data safe.” Media24 is one example of how media compa- nies had to move quickly to address this unprec- edented challenge, completely reinventing the way in which they work and produce content. “For many of them, the first step was adopting cloud-based collaboration, communications, and productivity tools like Microsoft 365 and specifically Microsoft Teams to enable remote work scenarios,” says Kellerhals. “Then, they looked to also enable remote work scenar- ios for core creative workflows like video and photo editing. By uploading their content to the cloud, media companies could make their con- tent accessible from anywhere. And by hosting their content creation tools on Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) and providing remote access to these VMs via Azure Virtual Desktop, their creative staff could not only access the content, but edit it with the same powerful tools they had been using in their offices from pretty much any- where, on any device.” Microsoft Azure provides a range of services that can help to support content production, both during and after the pandemic. Azure ExpressRoute provides a powerful solution for content ingestion, allowing organisations to extend their on-premises networks into the Microsoft cloud over a private connection with the help of a connectivity provider and upload content across the world. Content processing services like media workflow platform Azure Media Services provide a way to index, package, protect and stream video at scale, with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities enhancing con- tent discoverability and performance. Multiple storage tiers tailored to meet media company’s specific needs for storing work-in-progress and archived content are also available. “It’s fair to say that the pandemic caused a major business disruption for content production”