CDSA

A crucial challenge that many media and entertainment companies still face when it comes to security is achieving cost efficiencies, Ben Schofield, technical director of the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA), said Dec. 6 at the CDSA’s Content Protection Summit (CPS), during the session “Driving Cost Savings in Effective Production Security Operations.”

“There’s a lot of talk about security but, at the end of the day, what you have to drive [are] some efficiencies to get adoption,” he told attendees.

That, he said, is “because we can talk about the theoretical future of security [and] we can look at some of these things.”

But he told attendees: “Unless you’ve got some rubber meeting the road for the productions, productions by and large tend to be so busy doing the next production, they don’t really want to change. If something isn’t broken, they’re not going to try and fix it. So the only way you’re going to get their attention is by driving some really big savings.”

With that in mind, during the session, he discussed some of the latest content security best practices for production crews on set and location and how cost savings may be achieved.

What stands to also be helpful for the industry is constructing a common template that can be easily adapted by productions and the use of a secure wiki website that can be used to provide the latest information online to authenticated crew members and allow feedback and tracking of activity, he said.

“There are two things I really want to talk about here,” he went on to say. “There’s the production security working group, which is really focused on the manual and then the linking the mapping into the security controls and policies. And also about another foundational element here, which is about production identity.”

When it comes to identity, he noted that when somebody onboards to a company, it takes a number of weeks to get onboarded. “If your duration on the production is only two or three weeks, then by the time you’ve onboarded, you’ve already gone,” he pointed out.

A key goal is “removing friction because our verification process today is outsourcing” the cost involved, he said, adding that the “big picture [is] we’ve had a few meetings” of the working group tasked with solving these challenges.

Today, he said, “everyone is using the same technologies.” Therefore, he said, there are the “same vulnerabilities [and] the same controls apply horizontally across industries.”

He added that when “you look at the future here, we’re very much coming to a world where we need real time security.” At that point, he warned, an “annual assessment is not going to be good enough.”

To download the presentation, click here.

To view the entire session, click here.

Presented by Fortinet and produced by MESA, CDSA’s Content Protection Summit is sponsored by Convergent Risks, Richey May Technology Solutions, GeoComply, Signiant, Verimatrix, Shift Media, EIDR and EZDRM.