CDSA

HITS Fall: TPN Heads Offer Updates

LOS ANGELES — The heads of the Trusted Partner Network (TPN) — the industrywide content security initiative geared toward helping companies prevent breaches and leaks of pre-release film and TV content — offered attendees of the Oct. 4 Hollywood Innovation & Technology Summit (HITS) Fall event an update on the organization, and the progress it’s made since launching in April.

Ben Stanbury, chairman of the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA) and TPN’s CTO, shared that nearly 500 vendor companies are in the process of qualifying to join TPN, by undergoing an annual TPN security assessment, demonstrating they support industry-wide security controls, accepted by nearly 30 content companies that are part of TPN.

TPN — a joint venture of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and CDSA — aims to elevate the security standards of the industry’s production and distribution supply chain, offering content companies the ability to identify vendors who have been subject to assessments. And for vendors, Stanbury said, they’ll be reducing the number of assessments conducted at each facility and will be able to tout their security preparedness to content companies.

“The important thing, when you think about this platform approach, is we haven’t even realized some of the opportunities and potential of having this type of system within our industry,” said Guy Finley, executive director of CDSA and TPN’s CEO. “As this program grows, I think it’s going to be revolutionary.”

Part of that growth is TPN’s new Application & Cloud Security Initiative, which aims to help vendors and their customers both identify and prevent application, device, storage and workflow vulnerabilities.

Keith Ritlop, chair of TPN’s App & Cloud Subcommittee, and the TPN Technology & Development Advisory Committee, said the initiative will “raise overall security awareness and preparedness.”

“We’re really looking to make this a community-based effort,” he said. “The objective is we want you to be able to leverage these third-party apps. We’ve all been reinventing the wheel separately. Now we can come together and standardize, taking the onus off the individual content companies.”

TPN’s App & Cloud Security control framework is on track to be completed by the end of the year, with a second quarter, 2019 roll-out of new assessment certification programs, a training curriculum and recruitment of qualified assessors.

Additionally at HITS Fall, Cyril Rickelton-Abdi, chair of TPN Community & Outreach and the TPN Advisory Committee, offered attendees insight into the new TPN Guardians program, a security education and collaboration network for individuals involved in content production and distribution. Already, more than 150 TPN vendors have appointed a company Guardian as part of TPN, individuals who are tasked with developing and managing education, training and community programs.

Calling the Guardians “emissaries for TPN,” Rickelton-Abdi said that their goal is to increase security awareness within companies, “and expand awareness of what TPN does.”

“It is a unified program, establishing a single benchmark of minimal security preparedness,” he added.

HITS Fall was sponsored by Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Box, Ooyala, TiVo, Cognizant, DXC Technology, Gracenote, LiveTiles, ThinkAnalytics, Wasabi, Aspera, EIDR, MicroStrategy, the Trusted Partner Network, human-I-T, Zaszou IT Consulting, OnPrem Solution Partners, and Bob Gold & Associates, and was produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA), in association with the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA), the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), the Smart Content Council and Women in Technology Hollywood (WiTH).

Click here, here and here to download audio of the TPN presentations.