Bridging On-Prem and Cloud Infrastructure in Media Workflows: Finding the Right Balance
Paris, March 4, 2025
By Edel Garcia
Can you have too much of a good thing?
Imagine you’re running a restaurant. You have a fully equipped kitchen where you prepare meals every day. But during a sudden rush—let’s say a food festival—you need extra capacity. Instead of expanding your restaurant permanently (which is costly), you rent additional kitchen space temporarily. This is exactly the challenge media companies face when managing their workflows.
Keeping everything on-premises provides control and reliability, but it’s expensive and lacks flexibility. Moving everything to the cloud is scalable and convenient, but costs can spiral out of control if not managed properly. Like a restaurant balancing in-house and outsourced food prep, media organizations must strategically integrate on-prem and cloud infrastructure to ensure efficiency, scalability, and cost control. But where’s the sweet spot?
The Cost & Efficiency Trade-Off in Media Workflows
Media workflows depend on speed, cost, and accessibility—but no single infrastructure model is perfect.
1. On-Prem: The Fully Owned Kitchen
Keeping everything on-premises is like running a restaurant that never outsources food prep. Pros: Full control, predictable costs, security compliance. Cons: Requires large upfront investment, hardware maintenance, and lacks easy scalability
Some tasks must remain on-prem:
- High-performance rendering & editing where low latency is critical
- Sensitive content that can’t be uploaded to third-party cloud providers
- Workloads requiring stable, predictable costs rather than variable cloud expenses
2. Cloud: The On-Demand Kitchen Rental
Moving everything to the cloud is like renting kitchen space for every meal instead of owning a restaurant. Pros: Scalable, no hardware maintenance, global accessibility. Cons: Can be expensive with unpredictable costs, potential security concerns
Cloud works best for:
- Burst workloads, where occasional high-demand processing is needed
- Collaboration across multiple locations, such as remote editing teams
- Disaster recovery and archiving, since cloud storage is easily expandable
3. The Hybrid Approach: Best of Both Worlds
The key is balancing on-prem and cloud like a restaurant with both an in-house kitchen and external catering for peak hours.
A hybrid media workflow enables:
- Cost savings by using on-prem for predictable workloads and cloud for bursts
- Flexibility to scale cloud resources up or down as needed
- Security control by keeping critical assets local while using the cloud for distribution
But how do you make hybrid workflows cost-effective and seamless?
How to Optimize a Hybrid Media Workflow
1. Intelligent Job Distribution: Choosing the Right Kitchen for Each Meal
Think of an AI-driven kitchen manager that decides when to cook in-house and when to rent space.
In media workflows, automation tools can:
- Route high-performance tasks to on-prem infrastructure (like rendering-heavy projects)
- Offload scalable tasks to the cloud (like file transfers or AI-based metadata tagging)
- Use dynamic decision-making to prevent overuse of cloud resources
The goal? Reduce unnecessary cloud spending while maximizing on-prem investments.
2. Smart Storage Management: Keeping Ingredients Where They Matter
Would you store all your restaurant ingredients in an expensive, refrigerated truck rental instead of a local walk-in fridge? Of course not.
Similarly, media workflows should:
- Keep frequently accessed files on-prem for fast retrieval
- Move older assets to cloud archives where storage is cheaper
- Use automated policies to delete, migrate, or replicate assets based on usage patterns
This avoids excessive cloud egress fees (which can be surprisingly expensive when pulling data back from cloud storage).
3. Cost-Aware Scaling: Avoiding Unnecessary Overhead
A good restaurant doesn’t hire extra chefs during slow hours. Similarly, hybrid workflows should:
- Use cloud resources only when needed (e.g., spinning up VMs only during peak rendering)
- Schedule batch processing at off-peak hours when cloud pricing is lower
- Monitor cloud usage to avoid runaway costs from unexpected workloads
By automating cost-based decision-making, media companies can optimize spending without compromising performance.
Looking Ahead: The Future of Hybrid Media Workflows
The media industry’s move toward hybrid infrastructure mirrors broader trends in retail, transportation, and even food service:
- Edge computing will allow processing closer to users, reducing cloud data transfer costs
- AI-driven automation will further optimize how tasks are assigned across on-prem and cloud
- Cross-cloud interoperability will improve, making it easier to switch providers and prevent vendor lock-in
Final Thoughts: Finding the Right Recipe for Your Media Workflow
A successful hybrid media strategy is like a well-run restaurant—it optimizes resources, scales intelligently, and controls costs.
Key Takeaways:
- Keep mission-critical workloads on-prem for performance and control
- Use cloud resources strategically for scalability and collaboration
- Automate workflow decisions to avoid unnecessary expenses
- Optimize storage and cloud spend with smart scaling and cost monitoring
Media companies that find the right balance will enjoy cost savings, operational efficiency, and the ability to scale without breaking the bank—just like a restaurant that knows when to cook in-house and when to call in backup.
Edel Garcia
Director of Sales, Americas
About Embrace
Since 2015, Embrace has been transforming content creation at scale by connecting people, systems and processes. The company develops advanced automation, orchestration and collaboration solutions for the Media & Entertainment industry and global brands. Embrace aims to unleash creativity and improve performance around video and graphics supply chains.
Our products are heavily used 24/7 by leading media groups such as Arte Studio, BCE, Be tv, CANAL+, Disney-ABC News, Euronews, Hearst Networks EMEA, Madison Square Garden Networks, Mediawan Thematics, Mercedes-AMG, INA, Orange, Red Bee Media, RTL Group, Sinclair, TF1, TV5MONDE, Warner Bros. Discovery.
Visit www.embrace.fr for more information.
Contact Information
Aline Rolland, Marketing & Communication Manager | aline@embrace.fr
