Imagine this scenario in a modern day enterprise: you enter the office at 8 am and settle down in your chair for a live web-conference with your European counterparts just before they close shop for the day. Your IP phone allows you to connect with crystal clear clarity as your Tablet PC wirelessly connects to the corporate LAN, within seconds allowing you to broadcast your slide presentation to colleagues thousands of miles away. Digital music streams through the speakers as you wait for attendees to join the conference. A web-cam swivels out of one of the slim edges of the Tablet and your beaming face, worth a million bits, is projected to your colleagues.
In the background, imperceptible to you, you have unleashed tens of megabytes of data in a few seconds. To enable excellent digital end-user experience the enterprise has invested heavily in storage, transmission, and security. You've been served - digitally!
Digital Media Everywhere
To date Digital Media has been enabled by sophisticated technologies with opportunities for creativity, business, culture and enjoyment, as well as benefits for players all along the value chain.
After decades of investment in R&D, digital technologies have resulted in profitable industries including Information Technology, Micro-electronics, and Digital Communication. On the home front, there has been an adoption of technologies and devices such as Compact Disc, Digital Versatile Disc, Personal Video Recorder, interactive Televisions, digital cable, etc. These new distribution media have meant new content sales for the content industry, new device sales for the consumer electronics industry and improved audio and visual experience for the end-users.
In the enterprise, digital media growth is driven by the need to store, secure, access, and search through content quickly and effectively. Applications that are driving digital media use in the enterprise include e-learning, collaboration (including real time and asynchronous collaboration), video applications such as marketing, security, and Voice over IP. Therefore, a whole other set of technologies and devices has taken root in the modern enterprise. Smart near-line storage, encryption technologies, digital content creation, and search technologies; all combine to provide a faster alternative to the analog world of yesteryears.
Digital Media Defined
Digital media has various definitions depending on the context. For the purpose of this article, digital media includes all technologies and products that enable the creation, storage, security, transfer and use of digitized information. Some of the more common and recent consumer examples of digital media technologies and products include digital subscriber lines (DSL), digital cable, streaming media -- be it music or video, digital players and recorders including PVRs, DVDs, CDs, computers, etc. In the enterprise, digital media includes digital content creation systems, digital content storage (most disk based), digital content streaming/transmission for e-learning/collaboration and related applications, and digital content processing technologies for end-user within the enterprise.
Digital Media Explosion
University of California Berkeley researchers report that the amount of new information stored on paper, film, optical and magnetic media has doubled in the last three years to five exabytes -- or 5 million terabytes.
The researchers, supported by tech giants Microsoft, Intel, HP and EMC, said the amount of new information produced in those forms last year alone was the equivalent of 500,000 libraries, each containing a digital version of the print collections of the Library of Congress.
This information suggests that there are challenges faced by enterprises due to the explosion of digital media, ranging from managing email overload to ensuring the success of such activities as e-learning, web-conferencing, etc. The following describes the key challenges faced by enterprises:
Content creation - Enterprises whose core business is not the creation of digital media such as streaming video have outsourced this to organizations that specialize in this. However, content creation has become simple over time and several freeware tools are available that allow users to create digital content.
Content security and rights management - An area that continues to pose a challenge is content security. Content security defined here implies the secure transmission of content from source to destination, access of content or parts of it based on pre-determined authorizations, and control over what content flows over enterprise networks.
Content transmission - Enterprises have invested millions in bandwidth and continue to invest in technologies that enhance the behavior or transmission protocols and employ tactical measure to keep up with the need for greater bandwidth.
Content storage - Digital media storage does not follow the parameters set by analog media storage. New compression techniques, physical storage location on disks, speed of storage and retrieval, cost of storage are all factors that play into this problem.
Of the four key problems identified above, the two that appear to cause the greatest headache to IT executives are content security and storage. Therefore, this article will focus on security and storage related challenges posed to enterprises due to the explosive growth of digital media content.
Security Technologies and Challenges
Two technologies for securing digital content are cryptography and steganography (more specifically the tagging of information, known as 'watermarking'). In the sphere of watermarking technology, which is used to 'tag' digital information (in practice photograph, video and sound files), the usual aim of attacks is to remove the watermark.
The aim of cryptography is to find techniques to ensure the confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of data or of its origin. There are two main approaches: secret key cryptography and public key cryptography. One of the problems of secret key cryptography is key management. It is, in fact, necessary to have as many secret keys as correspondents, which rapidly becomes very complex. One answer to this problem is provided by public key cryptography. Using the public key cryptography approach, each correspondent uses not one, but two keys. One is secret (generally known as 'private'), the other is public. For example, if Alice and Bob (these names are standards in cryptography) wish to communicate, Alice has a private key xA and a public key yA, and the same applies to Bob. If Alice wishes to send a message to Bob, she looks for Bob's yB public key, uses it to encrypt the message and sends the encrypted message to Bob. A certain function links the public and private keys, and only Bob, with his secret key xB, is able to decrypt Alice's message. The security of these protocols is based on mathematical problems.
The dual object of steganography relates on the one hand to the ability to 'hide' information in data and thus to communicate confidentially (information hiding), and on the other hand to the tagging of digital data (watermarking). The main classes of watermarks (this technical term is essential to the following description) are as follows:
Perceptible by human beings
Not-perceptible by human beings: meaning invisible, if the application object is visual (e.g. a photograph, a video) or inaudible, if it is an audio object (e.g. music).
Fragile: the watermark can be altered/removed by simple changes to the support (photograph, video, music, etc).
Robust: the watermark is resistant to significant manipulations of the support. This aspect is particularly important when compression techniques, which are considered to be important changes to the original, are used.
Private: the watermark can only be detected on the original support (e.g. the original photograph.
Public: the watermark can be detected without the original support. One crucial aspect, when using a robust watermark system, is that the cost (financial, technological, etc) of attacking the protective measures (for example removing the watermark or rendering it unusable, etc) should be greater than the cost of using the product as intended.
There have been recent advancements in both these techniques. However, these two techniques have been most commonly applied to secure content either during creation or transmission of digital media. Two key challenges remain and they present opportunities for entrepreneurs:
Securing content from creation to access based on pre-designed security policies and access rights. Several companies have spawned in this space, including LiquidMachines, Authentica, Rightsline in addition to the large players such as Adobe, RealMedia, Microsoft, and IBM. However, none of these products or companies is able to deliver end-to-end secure creation, transmission, and access of digital media. Encrypted content can be decrypted, access rights can be violated by re-assigning roles and responsibilities, etc. A new breed of companies is arising which maintain a closer grip on access to critical data, media, and information based on roles, responsibilities, and underlying business rules. One such company is Bridgestream, which manages access to data based on dynamic roles and business rules. Given that offshore development is becoming commonplace, even in the entertainment industry, securing vital digital content as it is transmitted over public internet is important. There is likely to be an opportunity for companies to define end-to-end security of digital content for specific applications such as offshore development. Therefore, over the next couple of years, we envision a breed of companies that will deliver a higher level of digital content security through technologies that will derive from identity management, access control, and encryption.
Policy driven controls over what materials are allowed to travel of corporate infrastructure is another area that is likely to see new R&D efforts. While steganography helps secure information that it "hides", it also enables misuse by allowing the transmission of information against company policies or national laws. Therefore, companies such as Reconnex have developed digital content parsing appliances that leverage hardware acceleration to determine the nature of content flowing through corporate networks and either generate messages to corporate IT or take measures to purge the content at source or during transmission. This area is of great importance as companies are trying to lower various types of legal costs, which may stem from employee suits over improper content or SEC fines due to lack of information on "chain of custody" of vital digital content. Outlook envisions a new breed of companies that will be able to review all sorts of digital data on public or private networks and be able to ensure compliance with policies.
Other challenges such as DVD and CD encoding for music and video access, etc. are likely to be offshoots of larger R&D efforts and are likely to be driven by such organizations as the RIAA. It is unlikely that these technologies will support standalone companies in the near future.
Storage Technologies and Challenges
There have been recent advances in storage technologies. Over the next few years, storage will become more distributed than ever as specialized storage bins are likely to evolve. The storage industry started with unconnected PCs - the most distributed fashion of data. Over time, in the mid 1990s, after the Internet started to take hold, there was a push for storage to be centralized and various storage technologies such as SAN, NAS, and DAS evolved. Over the last several years, companies have realized that various applications and different types of data have different storage and retrieval needs and there is a recent shift away from "one-size-fits-all" storage. Different types of digital content, such as email, ERP/CRM/SCM application data, media files, live webcast information, etc. are best served by different storage technologies. Specifically, real-time media interactions may require specialized storage drives and technologies from companies such as Crossflux that enhance user experience by using a combination of soft-cache and hardware enhancements to traditional disk drives.
There are numerous drivers creating digital content that need to be stored and manipulated. Enterprises and consumers are converting existing analog content to digital, plus creating and handling new digital content. Storage devices offer an interesting value proposition to users. Although the growth in areal densities (megabits per square inch) has slowed, capacity is already enormous and is still increasing. For example, it is possible to envision serial ATA (SATA) disk capacity of over 1 terabyte on a single disk drive in two to three years.
With more and more human content available online, companies also need storage support for transaction processing and delivery. This trend favors advanced performance through Fibre Channel, serial SCSI, SAN, and NAS. To keep the content available, enterprises will likely need to use in-line and near-line storage in the near future. Analog media storage will be used as backup for entertainment and other content not subject to frequent searches. However, for archiving, enterprises are likely to continue to use tape as tape provides the best value proposition.
Digital Media storage is the catalyst behind two new storage technology companies. Exavio and Copan Systems are two companies looking at variations of MAID (massive arrays of idle disk) technology that prolong the life of disks and assist in bringing the disk per gigabyte cost on par with tape's price tag. Copan's unnamed product, due in April 2004, uses a MAID-based technology that allows serial ATA disks in an array to be started and stopped when access to a particular piece of data, on a specific drive, is needed. Copan can deliver a faster and more reliable disk-based solution for back-up and recovery at the same cost as tape. Meanwhile, Exavio has also been using a MAID-like technology in its ExaVault product to power up and power down ATA disks as needed for customers storing digital media, such as video and audio. The advantage of MAID-like technologies is similar to what one experiences with a DVD player compared to a VCR. With a DVD player it's easy to find scenes, whereas with VHS technology one has to rewind and forward blindly -- the same way one has to rewind tape. With disk storage, enterprises can locate data in milliseconds, while the mechanical nature of tape can take up to 10 seconds or more.
Overall, the choice of storage technology and media in the digital age enterprise is going to be determined by frequency of data writes and reads, cost of media, scalability of technology, and other existing IT purchasing policies. Outlook Ventures expects new companies to evolve in the following two areas:
Application specific distributed storage solutions. Nearly 60% of digital content in a typical Fortune 1000 firm is distributed across the network. Companies are now realizing that employees want to access these stores at varying frequencies (based on type of application) and for varying lengths of time. Further, as the cost of SerialATA disks falls and they become disposable, it is likely that enterprises will start to invest in application specific storage systems enabled by smart software and commodity hardware. Key applications are likely to get priority to near-line storage. Several startups are leveraging the trend of reduction in cost of Serial disks and availability of high bandwidth within corporate LANs. However, a good majority of these startups are likely to refocus their efforts on specific applications as they realize the challenges inherent in offering one-size-fits-all solutions.
Arrays of disk drives that enable real-time reads and writes of megabytes of information. Disk drives today were not designed for accessing megabytes of information in seconds. The underlying storage, access, and caching technologies combined do not deliver the rich end-user experience that one expects from digital content. Therefore, Outlook Ventures predicts that companies will develop and market disk drives that will enable very high quality multimedia experience. Additionally, enterprises will find access to smart disk drives and storage systems that are geared toward the storage and retrieval of media files.
Summary
Digital media is everywhere and it is growing. Some analysts estimate, growth at a CAGR of more than 20%. Therefore, the challenges imposed by this growth in enterprise technology infrastructure are likely to be amplified over time. This trend presents an excellent opportunity for entrepreneurs to build technologies that overcome these challenges.
This article was researched and written by Sandeep Aneja, Associate with Outlook Ventures.
