Sky has built a private cloud to help it solve the challenge of storing its growing swathes of data.
The broadcaster picked object-based storage provider Cleversafe as the foundation of its cloud platform, using it to store petabytes of unstructured data including video, documents and audio files.
Sky’s priorities when picking a cloud platform were security, scalability and accessibility, as it sought a way to store more and more complex data that could be readily accessed without adding to its data centre costs.
Will Westwick, head of enterprise technology at Sky, explained the firm is mostly looking to manage a large amount of unstructured data, in the form of video, audio and documents.
“As data grows, it becomes harder and harder to make this a reality in an economically sustainable way," he said.
The firm chose Cleversafe for its alleged 24/7 availability, and its ability to relocate files across Sky’s regional data centres.
“Cleversafe’s platform has the maturity and scalability we require, while also supporting our objective to lower data centre TCO without compromising service. This is a fundamental requirement as we scale,” added Westwick.
Sky noted that the Cleversafe platform does not require “heavy lifting”, and that it has been able to support the private cloud with its existing IT teams.
