Cloud computing was once a buzzword. Now it’s a reality. This massive adoption of cloud is happening across nearly every industry and vertical as companies look to lower costs and increase agility. In this blog, we explore how two of our media and entertainment customers, Sesame Workshop and America’s Test Kitchen, are embracing the cloud to unlock added business value.

Sesame Workshop Supports Key Digitization Efforts and Moves to the Cloud with Rubrik

Sesame Workshop is a non-profit providing educational entertainment to children through a variety of media platforms and is best known for overseeing Sesame Street, the longest-running children’s show of all-time.

Delivering educational programming to children in over 150 countries, Sesame Workshop’s IT team manages over 45 years-worth of intellectual property. Having previously relied on outdated, complex, legacy technologies, the organization selected Rubrik to help their team protect, archive, and manage business-critical data and content and to accelerate their use of Microsoft Azure.

Sesame Workshop CTO Shadrach Kisten insists that the cloud is necessary for content archival, long-term retention, and accessibility among team members – something Rubrik facilitates. According to Kisten, “With Rubrik, we will be able to archive to Azure for 90 days and then push the data into Azure Blob for cold storage. It only takes a few clicks to restore, which is a massive win.”

Additionally, building a scalable, integrated cloud infrastructure allows the team to easily keep data protected and accessible. Kisten notes, “Protecting our intellectual property means everything to us. There were some initial concerns about moving to public cloud, but Rubrik ensures all data is encrypted at-rest and in-flight using our keys. We’re confident that our data is secure.”

With Rubrik’s management simplicity and API-driven automation, Sesame Workshop has increased productivity and shifted to a DevOps mindset, freeing up time to focus on strategic IT initiatives that increase global engagement. Kisten says, “Since Rubrik requires almost no management, we can focus on key engineering projects instead. Rubrik’s REST APIs will be integral in allowing us to automate multiple aspects of our data management functions.”

Sesame Workshop’s digital transformation strategy has immediately resulted in hard cost savings – something incredibly important for nonprofit organizations. According to Rudy Cordero, Senior Director of IT, the organization is seeing a 40% reduction in TCO costs and a 50% reduction in data center footprint. These savings have been reinvested back into the organization to focus on strategic business initiatives.

From archiving sensitive data and ensuring its availability, to lowering operational costs, the cloud is an essential tool for organizations like Sesame Workshop looking to get the most out of their large media repositories.

America’s Test Kitchen Utilizes Rubrik to Accelerate Media Digitization and Unlock Multi-Cloud Data Control

The digital age continues to redefine how and when media is consumed. Founded in 2001 as an independent media company, America’s Test Kitchen has helped millions of cooks enhance their culinary skills with food-related TV programs, magazines, cookbooks, websites, and podcasts.

Although America’s Test Kitchen began as a publishing company, the company’s strong digital presence requires their content strategy to be more agile and channel-agnostic. Becoming increasingly reliant on a strong digital presence to expand its reach, America’s Test Kitchen uses the cloud and Rubrik to ensure that content is available both externally and internally. Dustin Brandt, Director of IT, states, “At ATK, IT is vital in everything we do–from hosting America’s Test Kitchen, to airing podcasts, to delivering the websites. Our services need to be available and secure for our employees and consumers at all times.”

Thus, Brandt and his team are focused on scaling their technology stack. In Brandt’s words, “Our digital transformation is about moving the needle on content delivery and content production. We want all of our assets digitized and readily available. Part of that strategy is to expand our infrastructure into the cloud, taking a hybrid, best-of-breed approach to introduce new elements like Rubrik into our infrastructure as we retire legacy tools.”

Brandt and his team use Rubrik to protect, manage, and control their digitized assets on-prem and across multiple clouds. According to Brandt, “With Rubrik, we can achieve multi-cloud data control by mobilizing data to two different clouds for long-term retention and disaster recovery. We can easily automate the conversion of on-prem VMs into cloud-native formats with Rubrik’s ultra-light architecture, in addition to retaining instant access of our cloud data via predictive search.”

America’s Test Kitchen’s investments into a cloud-enabled architecture has led to immediate added business value. For instance, Brandt and his team have seen an 83% reduction in their data center footprint while the ability to quickly produce valid backups and recoveries of data have aided the team in successfully meeting compliance. “With annual financial audits, we have to ensure valid backups of our data and recoveries on the fly. Rubrik provides critical evidence of compliance for our backup requirements with our auditors,” says Brandt.

This increased use of the cloud will likely prompt many entertainment companies to rely on modern data management solutions like Rubrik that are simple to use, API-driven, and cost-effective to scale.

Want to see more ways customers are unlocking the benefits of Rubrik? Read our case studies.