Cloud On-Prem

For a company like EZDRM, the leverage of centrally managed, shared software security resources was both an early call to action and an easy architectural decision to take. At the same time, the EZDRM team is justifiably proud of its ability to solve real world content security problems for our clients. Although we believe firmly in our cloud-centric DRMaaS architecture, we recognize that there are a number of customer configurations that require some special treatment to combine the benefits of cloud services with local cases of real world constraints on Internet bandwidth and availability.

A specific use-case challenge arose for one of our Telco clients, operating a new video service on an island that had constrained connectivity to the global Internet. The client was able to process, package, and deliver high-bandwidth video streams reliably to customers across the island using the local network connections, but experienced intermittent failures in access to cloud resources based in the typical global data centers remote from the island’s network.

The EZDRM team wanted to ensure this client was able to take advantage of all business benefits of secure video delivery and associated cloud DRM service to customers of the Telco both on and off the island, but to improve availability of the DRM license delivery service to customer devices.

The resulting EZDRM deployment configuration has come to be termed DRMaaS Cloud On-Prem, and represents a durable and cost effective way to help this Telco client with their business goals while potentially having much broader applications.

The Cloud On-Prem cloud-hybrid solution has just a few components:

• The customer service configuration in the EZDRM cloud infrastructure. This configuration is, to all intents and purposes, 100% standard with respect to both content packaging and customer device license delivery.
• A local Telco server installation that acts as the local, primary EZDRM service instance that manages key service for content packaging and client license delivery. An innovative DNS configuration on the Telco network enables client devices on the Island network to take full advantage of local high bandwidth and low latency to the local EZDRM service instance, while enabling a fallback service that is supported directly by the EZDRM cloud instance.
• A point-to-point resilient VPN connection that links the two EZDRM service instances to synchronize the data as and when bandwidth permits.

As part of the service to this client, EZDRM takes on full responsibility for the software configuration of the local on-prem server resources, with delivery of all necessary software components as a virtual machine image, complete with a full remote maintenance/update management service. The choice and delivery of on-prem server hardware is, of course, fully under the control of the local data center/IT team.

The deployment of the EZDRM service, enhanced by Cloud On-Prem components, has enabled our client to provide a rich, reliable video service that is not wholly dependent on a connection to global cloud infrastructure, but takes full advantage of such a connection when it is available.