What you need from your ‘corporate YouTube’ – part 3

Posted · Add Comment

Security, reliability and support

In Parts 1 and 2 we looked at various elements of the user experience to ensure your corporate YouTube is easy to use and is designed to draws in viewers. In this post, we’ll go deeper into the drier but absolutely crucial aspects of security and reliability.

 

IT worker drawing computer network on digital screen.

To keep your sensitive information on your side of the firewall, avoid cloud-based storage and publicly hosted sites.

‘Keep it secret, keep it safe’

Like Frodo with the One Ring, your organisation no doubt has precious intellectual property and sensitive information that you don’t want to fall into the wrong hands. There are far too many sad stories of companies being devastated by information leaks – don’t be one of them!

The only way to completely ensure the privacy of your content is to keep it on your side of the firewall. Any video stored on a cloud server or hosted on a public site, even if it’s on a ‘private’ channel, should be considered as good as public. (A public hosting service such as YouTube will also require sensitive data such as employee names or email addresses.) A dedicated enterprise video platform, on the other hand, keeps your information safely within your own network, even when content is being delivered to remote offices or staff using mobile devices.

Even within your organisation, not every video is for every employee – so you need to be able to easily control who can see what, specifying access by seniority, department and even individual. Equally, on the content administration side,  it’s important to have multiple tiers of authorisation for content creation / uploading / managing.

 

Scaleability – don’t be a victim of your own success

What happens when there’s a super important video that everyone wants to watch as soon as it comes out? There’s an announcement about a restructure or company results, for example. Everyone wants to watch the video at the same time. Suddenly your intranet is flooded with demand, or everyone is accessing your corporate YouTube channel via the company’s broadband, and the sheer volume of users may over overload your network. An error message is never a good look, but especially not on the day of a key announcement. Just imagine the tickets and complaints flooding into IT and/or the communications team….

There is no need to have the threat of this nightmare scenario hanging over your head! With any enterprise video solution, you should seek expert advice from consultants who will work with your network and IT security teams, speaking their language, to identify and solve issues before they happen. They can do load testing ahead of time to ensure that the system can cope with the maximum number of users you could ever expect to have at any given time.

hd-encoder-for-meetings

A simple, scaleable solution with a single ‘box’ connecting content source to viewers, either live or on demand.

 

 

24/7 phone and email support

This brings us to our final point: make sure there’s 24/7 support available should you need it. If for whatever reason you’re having trouble, whether it’s due to user error or not, a ‘submit ticket’ option is just not going to cut it! Whether you have shift workers working all hours or users spread across time zones, it’s great to feel reassured that you can get an expert on the phone 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Ideally, remote access support should be offered so that the IT support person can actually see your screen, diagnose the problem and fix it instantly, instead of just trying to describe verbally what to do.

 

Summary

Business button 24 hours service icon web sign

A great enterprise video system helps keep staff connected wherever they are, 24/7.

Video is an amazingly powerful communications channel to keep people informed, connected and motivated – but in a work setting it’s only as good as the system behind it.

As we’ve discussed in this 3-part series, there are many essential elements of a corporate YouTube solution. If any one of them is missing or not good enough, your organisation will be missing out on the huge opportunities made available  by video. Even worse, using the wrong video communication tools could negatively affect your network, thus risking  your business continuity – or could even set you up for a devastating information leak.

The good news is that Encoded Media’s Enterprise Video platform ticks every single box we’ve talked about, and more. EM have built custom solutions for all types and sizes of organisations – from global banks, to NHS hospitals, to medium-sized schools.

We hope the information in this series has been useful. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you! Email jamie.cunningham@encodedmedia.com or click the chat button on the left side of the screen.