Some of 91快活林鈥檚 customers saw the number of events and productions they were producing double and even quadruple during the pandemic as their organization鈥檚 leaders strove to remain connected to their teams and staff.

What types of events and productions are we talking about here?

• Large, in-person events held in-person an auditorium with a few speakers, a few hundred or thousand in-person, and hybrid attendees
• Important internal communications directed to the entire company or whole divisions
• External content directed to shareholders
• Ensuring senior leaders look and sound excellent when being interviewed by news or other external organizations

Content producers at large enterprises, whether their audiences are internal or external, are demanding:

• More engaging approaches to keep hybrid employees engaged and aligned
• Dynamic, collaborative approaches that still retain a professional feel
• More polished content

Recently, Ross has been fielding requests from customers to help them deal with these demands and 鈥渢ake their productions to the next level.鈥� They鈥檙e aware that they need more professional equipment to get the effect they鈥檙e after, but the complexity of professional production technology can be a bit intimidating.

In this post, we鈥檒l examine some of the things 91快活林 is doing to address some of the fears that our Pro AV customers have shared with us:

• 鈥淩oss isn鈥檛 for me 鈥� it鈥檚 too intimidating. I鈥檓 not a broadcaster.鈥�
• 鈥淚鈥檝e worked in this industry for years, but don鈥檛 have the knowledge or familiarity I think I need.鈥�
• 鈥淚 don鈥檛 have the personnel to staff a broadcast-level production.鈥�

The Rising Focus on Keeping Employees Engaged

Following the pandemic, we鈥檙e seeing organizations facing a new challenge: keeping employees engaged to deliver on retention goals. The workforce that became effective and accustomed to working remotely is now exhausted from sitting in the same long, boring online meetings.

Leaders want to offer their hybrid and remote employees more professional, engaging events for a variety of reasons, and here are a few things we鈥檙e seeing from the world鈥檚 largest companies:听Summary

We鈥檙e excited to support more organizations with their goals of increasing the quality of their events and improving employee engagement and are delighted to offer everything you need in one solution.

A desire to have more work done in person.

Leaders perceive a value in the networking, communication, and enjoyment that employees get out of seeing one another in person when attending an in-person event and want to promote it. With that said, if the experience of attending an in-person event is equivalent to (or worse than!) than attending online, a barrier is introduced to the employee.

Increasing production value will help to align teams around shared objectives.

Leaders use dynamic, exciting yearly kick-offs and quarterly updates to energize their teams and support them in communicating their objectives. With many large organizations having a geographically distributed workforce, ensuring that everyone is aligned is key to ensuring work flows smoothly through the system.

Increasing production value will help ensure that company-wide messages are heard and understood.

Thousands of hours go into corporation-wide training materials and messages on updates to policies and practices. Ensuring that the employee onboarding, human resource announcements, yearly ethics training, or quarterly safety and security updates are well attended and engaging is critical to the effectiveness of these messages.

A desire to show employees they鈥檙e valued.

Great presentations by an organization鈥檚 leaders inspire connection, boost engagement, and improve morale. Professional production equipment is being deployed worldwide to create amazement and drive organizational loyalty in huge numbers of employees. Offering employees a professional-feeling event expresses how much they and their work are valued.

A Return to More Polished Internal and External Communications

To keep companies functioning during the pandemic, many organizations turned to Zoom and Teams to run large meetings. Slides were shared, dogs barked, and leaders appeared via pixelated webcam video feeds at various angles with terribly lit, eclectic backgrounds.

While the leaders at these large organizations use a variety of communication styles, all of them need more than a webcam and some slides to engage their audience. In addition to assisting leaders with how they鈥檙e perceived internally, additional benefits include:

Resetting the tone for communication with customers and staff.

Organizations everywhere are struggling to regain the sense of professionalism that existed as part of their corporate culture prior to the pandemic. When leaders begin to relinquish their spare rooms and t-shirts, they鈥檙e modeling the behavior, conduct, and appearance they expect of their staff and, in turn, will impact the customer experience their organization offers.

No more dogs barking.

Throughout the pandemic, carefully crafted messages were continuously interrupted, and executives are done with the status quo 鈥� dogs barking, children talking, someone off mute. The organizations that Ross works with are keen to regain control over the messages that their staff are receiving.

Enhancing your leader鈥檚 public persona.

When an organization鈥檚 executive has an interview or a spotlight by a news channel, they want to look their best. Fortune 500 companies worldwide are investing in small studio spaces that allow their executives to present confident, properly branded communications that set them and their organization in the best light.

Good News! Companies like Ross are Catering to Pro A/V Professionals

There鈥檚 no question that professional production equipment creates great productions, but it鈥檚 also very complex, and the flexibility it provides can be daunting. At first glance, the terminology can be obscure and almost impenetrable, even for the most seasoned A/V professional.

To help large organizations up their production game, Ross is repackaging our boutique technology to help onboard organizations into its use. And we鈥檝e been successful: the demand for Ross technologies is growing dramatically for use with internal and external messaging.

听鈥淵ou no longer go to multiple vendors. Ross offers a single solution.鈥�

— Matt Morgan, Business Development Manager, 91快活林

Here are a few of the ways that Ross is investing to make our technology more accessible for companies:

Robots make things simpler.

Much of the tone of a show is given by the speed, direction, and movement of the cameras. Moving away from static camera positions is one of the first ways that content teams want to improve their productions.

Ross鈥� Camera Motion Systems create beautiful, engaging, stable shots and only need to be configured once. Once you鈥檝e set the cameras up, you can easily recall movements again and again. This allows a single operator to simulate a full-scale production.

Architecting solutions.

91快活林 offers all the professional broadcast-quality production equipment that organizations need. Our solution architects work directly with corporations to define solutions that can be deployed repeatedly at various sites, which lowers the need for training and maintenance. Our customers love that they can work with one team to purchase, install, commission, and configure their solution.

Included in our corporate solutions are:

• Custom Control Interfaces 鈥� DashBoard
• Production Switchers/Mixers 鈥� Carbonite, Acuity
• Cameras and Robots 鈥� Furio, SkyDolly, ACIDCam
• Recording Servers 鈥� Tria

Conclusion

We鈥檙e excited to support more organizations with their goals of increasing the quality of their events and improving employee engagement and are delighted to offer everything you need in one solution.

Come visit us at NAB 2023!

Come visit us for a tour of our Corporate Solutions and to learn more about our products and how we can cater to your every video need, from the camera lens to your customer鈥檚 screen.

Contributors

About Amanda Holtstrom

Amanda Holtstrom is Product Manager for DashBoard and Ross Platform Manager. She鈥檚 responsible for ensuring that Ross鈥� investments in her product line align with customer needs. Amanda previously worked as an enterprise content management consultant, and she鈥檚 passionate about clear and effective communications and the value they present for organizations large and small.

About Matt Morgan

Matt Morgan is the Business Development Manager for the corporate market at 91快活林, where he supports customers in finding the right solution to host their live events. Matt has over 10 years of experience working in various technology segments and the church production industry. His last gig was managing a 4K facility that broadcasted to over 40 campuses and to viewers worldwide.

Engage with us in the corporate community!

Check out the to engage with us on other topics, questions, and concerns. We鈥檒l respond!

The post Enabling the Move from Pro A/V to Professional Productions appeared first on 91快活林.

In response to the increasing awareness of the need to secure production technology, 91快活林 was motivated by several key trends to invest in a new focus on security. As a technology vendor whose equipment was primarily installed in locked server rooms and highly secured physical locations on separate networks, our security was previously partially taken care of by ensuring segregated networks.

鈥淥ne of the challenges facing product technology vendors like Ross is solving how, why, and even whether to apply Zero Trust standards and rules to the technologies that make up the production operations fabric.鈥�

-John Naylor, Director of Product Security

Key Security Trends

As early as 2017, thought leaders within the production industry began to raise concerns about the architecture and support for the secure control of these systems, as well as the transport and storage of the content. The increasing requirements in requests for proposals that we engaged with prompted the imperative to mature our cybersecurity. In a few short years, the questions related to security had gone from non-existent to mandatory considerations.

Ross鈥檚 Response

Ross responded to the increasing awareness within the production technology industry in February 2018 by forming the Product Security team. Their mandate is to ensure that Ross products meet best practice standards for infosec and privacy when installed on customers鈥� networks.

John Naylor and Gaurav Saxena comprise the core unit, with champions in each team.

鈥淚 want to make the world more secure and reliable, and what better place to do that than in a company that builds the backbone that delivers the world鈥檚 live content? Security as a capability is new to this industry, and I鈥檓 helping change Ross鈥檚 perception of it from a mere add-on to a product.

We take a broader view: security as a complete process.鈥�

-Gaurav Saxena, Product Security Architect

For the past several years, the Product Security team has worked closely with Ross product teams to educate and elevate the understanding and need for security to be not only a priority but a fundamental building block.

The key achievements of the group include:

• We are educating and supporting Ross in adopting the Microsoft Secure Development Lifecycle (MS SDL).
• We are establishing and evolving the vulnerability response procedure, which keeps customers informed of any risks to Ross products.
• We are establishing the Ross Security Framework, which assesses the rate at which products are maturing and the overall security of their products and delivery processes.

All products complete their quarterly product security checklists to help them mature.

听鈥淥ne of the biggest challenges of the Product Security team has been to support Ross in living up to the customer鈥檚 best interest where security is concerned. We鈥檝e designed and implemented a rapid response procedure for handling emerging vulnerabilities that raises customer visibility and speedily resolves the security risks our customers are exposed to.鈥�

-John Naylor

Building a Secure Production Ecosystem

Protecting content and systems from slips and malicious actors has now become a critical part of product delivery within Ross. As our practices have evolved, we鈥檙e working to enable several vital shifts within the industry, as detailed below.

Emerging Interest in IP-based productions

Production technology expenditures are increasingly scrutinized by financial and operations staff across vertical applications 鈥� corporate, news and sports 鈥� and production technology teams are compelled to look at networking and content management approaches that their IT counterparts have used for years. This change brings a new focus on IP-based video transport and logical vs. physical routing of rich media content.

Once that content hits the network, it鈥檚 no longer as secure as when transported by physical cables linking the cameras to the router. It is critical to ensure that the packets of data remain safe, that production is not interrupted, and that systems continue functioning in the IP world.

Organizations like听听and听听are supporting the industry by publishing guidelines and recommendations and forming subcommittees to help guide production technology consumers to secure their content, software, and services.

The Benefits of Zero Trust Topologies

As IT departments embrace the zero trust philosophy, insisting that every stage of digital interaction is authorized becomes critical. The concept is causing many thought leaders within the production technology space to take note.

The complexity of large video production systems caused by various vendors, discrete platforms, and signal formats can make the aspiration to establish a Zero Trust environment sound impractical.

鈥淭he priority for product security is coming from the very top. Our CEO, David Ross, endorses and supports the vision for product security, and product teams must deliver on that vision. We all work together to mature and deliver on the product security framework. The product leaders at Ross understand and support the overall goal of providing a set of tools that work together securely.鈥�

-Ashesh Sharma, Product Owner

Through sustained, incremental delivery, Ross is taking many small steps and working with other friendly vendors (code of ethics #8) to adopt shared standards that support our customers in having mixed vendor environments and multiple purchasing options.

Facilitating Secure Ground to Cloud

While the shift to adopt cloud-based production technologies has been slower than the industry expected, this is a trend that Ross is watching. The need to ensure that video signals and control data both flow securely between the hardware deployed onsite and the cloud is obvious but non-trivial to achieve.

For vendors creating new, exciting, and operationally efficient cloud-based technologies that solve production problems, paying attention to security has become top of mind. Relying on a network perimeter is no longer sufficient for vendors looking to offer technologies that work in cloud-hybrid infrastructure models.

Adopting Security Standards and Standardizing Our Language

Maturing the way that Ross communicates internally and externally with customers about security-related topics has been a big part of the Corporate Security team鈥檚 objectives.

Our sales and product management teams are now equipped to converse and provide solutions that address our customer鈥檚 needs as requests for proposals bring increased security requirements. If security incidents occur, Ross has processes that allow us to respond and address them quickly. We use both capabilities to ensure that we meet our customers鈥� needs and keep environments secure.

Exploring Zero Trust and IS-10

One of the critical areas that Ross has been ramping up on is our understanding of the publicly available standards for implementing Zero Trust topologies. A necessary part of this approach is to provide speedy authorization for any request. Gone are the days when physical access to the port guaranteed that you were entitled to make a request.

The听听being developed by AMWA, fills the global gap for production technology providers. It recommends the use of OAuth 2.0 and uses web tokens to identify and authorize systems making requests.

Incidents & Responses

As new threats emerge and we continuously discover new vulnerabilities, Ross has developed a robust approach to assessing these risks and communicating with customers. Building our understanding of the common terminology used within the security industry has been instrumental in ensuring that we use clear, practical language.

A great example of the response from Ross was the worldwide incident caused by the Log4j exploit we discovered in Dec 2021.

鈥淩oss鈥檚 response to the Log4J incident taught us that we needed a trained response team. We were some of the first to respond amongst production technology vendors, but that response relied on people going above and beyond, which is the Ross way. With that said, we wanted to formalize the response capability so the organization is ready for the next threat. And we鈥檝e spent the past year doing just that.鈥�

— John Naylor

Summary

As the industry transitions to interconnected and cloud-based solutions, digital security becomes paramount and part of the fundamental building blocks of our products. Ross stays ahead of the curve by proactively keeping our products and systems up-to-date with the latest security standards, zero trust architectures, and best practices.

Learn More

Visit听the 91快活林 website听to learn more about our products and how we can securely cater to your every video need, from the camera lens to your customer鈥檚 screen.

Contributors

About John Naylor

John serves as Vice President of Enterprise Management and Director of Product Security. He spends his days shepherding the product management and delivery teams within Ross to mature the security of how they deliver technology. His days are spent gathering information, monitoring the production technology market, and working with other vendors on standards and guidelines.

John is an active member of the NABA Technical Committee Cyber Sub-committee, the SMPTE Study Group on Security in ST-2059 (aka PTP), and the advisory board for the TV Newscheck Cybersecurity Retreat for Broadcasters. He presented his paper, 鈥淭owards Zero Trust in Broadcast,鈥澨�.

About Gaurav Saxena

Gaurav serves as Product Security Architect within the Ross Product Security team. As a Cyber Security practitioner with 17+ years of experience, he has experience planning and delivering cybersecurity projects and applying his expertise in various security scenarios. Keenly interested in learning about new technology, Gaurav is excited to use his knowledge to secure the technologies transporting Ross customers鈥� content.

About Ashesh Sharma

Ashesh is a Product Owner at Ross, prioritizing product security features and testing. In his previous role as Security Champion, he worked closely with the Product Security team to build the team鈥檚 appreciation for security and the impact it can have on Ross鈥� customers. He is passionate about 鈥渟ecure by design,鈥� 鈥渦ser data privacy,鈥� and other security-focused initiatives.

Engage with us in the security community!

Check out the听听to engage with us on other topics, questions, and concerns. We鈥檒l respond!

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