Media Archival on AWS: Smart,Cost-Optimized Content Lifecycle Management

Media companies face operational and financial challenges managing massive archives - tape libraries, siloed NAS systems, fragmented metadata, and unpredictable retrieval costs. These legacy architectures limit content reuse, delay restoration for monetization opportunities, and increase operational overheads.

The HCLTech Media Archival on AWS solution delivers a unified archival platform designed for petabyte-scale content, with automated tiering, accelerated restores, and rich metadata indexing. It provides full control over your data while leveraging AWS storage, analytics, and AI services to reduce total cost of ownership and enable faster access to high-value assets

Key Benefits and Features:

• Helps Enable Data Sovereignty and Compliance

o Deploy in supported AWS Regions to align with regulatory and content distribution compliance requirements.

o Ensure content remains entirely within your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with controlled access boundaries.

o Integrate seamlessly with existing on-premises environments using AWS Direct Connect and DataSync for efficient, checksum-verified bulk ingestion.

o Achieve complete visibility of asset lifecycle with built-in metadata lineage tracking and auditability.

• Designed to Reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

o Intelligent warm/cold tiering strategy using Amazon S3 Standard-IA and Glacier Deep Archive to lower storage costs by 50–70%.

o Automated restore workflows reduce operational overhead and shorten time-to-value for legacy content.

o Cost dashboards and automated budget guardrails ensure predictable retrieval economics.

o Eliminate physical tape handling costs, maintenance cycles, and logistics delays.

• AI-Ready Metadata & Content Discovery

o Automatically catalog and index selected metadata fields (e.g., title, rights, keys, tiers) with AWS Glue and OpenSearch Serverless.

o Enable fast, faceted search and reporting via Amazon Athena and QuickSight dashboards.

o Optional AI workflows using Amazon SageMaker to predict recall probabilities and optimize tiering policies.

• Automated & Observable Infrastructure

o Deploy your archival environment consistently and rapidly with AWS CloudFormation (Infrastructure as Code).

o Automate data lifecycle management and monitoring using AWS Step Functions and CloudWatch.

o Gain deep operational visibility with pre-configured dashboards and audit trails for governance and compliance.

Our Proven Methodology

Our engagement follows a simple three-step process to ensure success:

1. Assessment: We analyze your current archival landscape, tape/NAS dependencies, restore SLAs, and cost drivers.
2. Solution Design: We tailor the AWS-native architecture with tiering, indexing, governance, and cost guardrails for your specific operational profile.
3. Validation & Deployment: We deploy a proof-of-concept and accelerate your path to a production-ready archival environment.

Solution Scope, Prerequisites, and Responsibilities

Scope of Offering: This professional services offering includes the assessment, solution design, and deployment of a proof-of-concept for the Media Archival solution on AWS. The engagement delivers a tailored reference architecture that addresses both operational efficiency and cost optimization, with a clear path toward production rollout.

Prerequisites: Customer must have an established AWS account and landing zone. Customer must provide access to their NAS/tape archive inventory and metadata sources for integration planning

Shared Responsibility Model:

• HCLTech: Delivers the professional services outlined in the assessment, design, and deployment phases of this engagement. Optional managed services are available under a separate contract.

• Customer: Owns archival content, manages access policies, and is responsible for ongoing operation of the deployed solution.

• AWS: Provides and maintains the underlying cloud infrastructure in line with the AWS Shared Responsibility Model. See AWS documentation for more details.