Clearcast Cuts Off-Site Backup Storage Costs by 50%

Sohonet Ltd, in connectivity and data management for the media and entertainment industry, announced that broadcast advertising pre-clearance specialist, Clearcast Ltd, has reduced its backup storage costs by half since it has implemented Sohonet’s storage solution, Sohonet Media Storage to store its encrypted backups offsite.

Clearcast was founded in 2008 by Britain’s eight largest commercial broadcasters to simplify the process of getting advertising to air. Its primary service is to provide pre-clearance for TV advertising for most broadcasters, ensuring that adverts adhere to The UK Code of Broadcast Advertising. Its additional services include, pre-clearance for VOD and teleshopping ads, www.onlineflashtest.com (the only automated service providing Flashing and Regular Pattern testing for photo sensitive epilepsy), The Attribution Service, Pitching & Campaign Planning services and TV Admin.

Clearcast installed its 1Gb/s Sohonet Media Network (SMN) connection and a Sohonet Failover Solution in 2011 to support its existing service offerings and future-proof its network infrastructure. In 2012, the company wanted to push as much of its back-office function into the cloud as possible to ultimately save costs and achieve more business flexibility.

Sohonet Media Storage was subsequently implemented in early September to securely store copies of their encrypted backups offsite.

James Morgan-Yates, CTO, Clearcast, said: “As Clearcast’s enterprise data footprint rapidly grew and thus the size of backups, transfer speeds and fast data access become important factors in our choice of cloud storage provision. It made sense to leverage the speed and security benefits of SMN to backup, replicate and store backup copies of our business data. Sohonet not only has a strong heritage of media expertise and excellent customer support, but crucially it doesn’t charge us for accessing our own data since our bandwidth usage is unlimited and uncontended as part of our SMN service. Since implementing Sohonet Media Storage we have realised significant cost savings of over 50% as we were able to ditch our expensive, second data centre in Farnborough.”

Sohonet Media Storage was launched earlier this year as an extensible, secure and flexible storage solution to provide additional and supplementary storage when local storage has reached critical or maximum utilisation. Designed and developed to meet the short-term project needs of the media and entertainment industry, it provides affordable access to short and long-term archiving, backup and parking and is a viable option for intermediate storage or as an alternative to LTO or portable disks.

Morgan-Yates adds: “We were genuinely amazed at how quickly our Storage service was set up by Sohonet. Within an hour of our first meeting, we were successfully testing Sohonet Media Storage and realising the cost and time benefits of transferring and accessing our data in the Cloud, via the SMN. In no time at all, we had gained greater business agility just by automatically replicating our backups offsite overnight, which we could not do before.”

Damien Carroll, COO, Sohonet, said: “We are delighted that Sohonet Media Storage has had such a strong impact at Clearcast. Sohonet’s new Storage solution has been developed specifically to enable media companies and software providers to access expansive resources cost-effectively. This flexibility on top of the required high network performance of our Sohonet Media Network provides the security, performance and scalability media companies need. Increasing numbers of media companies such as Clearcast are becoming more confident in the costs and security benefits of private cloud services to support back-office and media workflow processes and we look forward to continuing our close working relationship with Clearcast to help them achieve their ambitious technical objectives.”

Clearcast is currently working on an important project to replace its online clearance system, Adway, with a next-generation copy clearance solution, CopyCentral, that will make it even easier to get commercials approved for broadcast. This will be launched in the second quarter of 2014.