Media.
Recovery time is the metric
Production platforms have hard deadlines and storage estates that grow faster than the budget set aside for them. Availability matters, but what the contract is really bought for is how quickly the work comes back when something fails.
The deadline holds, and last quarter's archive is still retrievable at the speed the edit needs.
Scoped per system during discovery, against the deadline it serves.
Working, near-line and archive, each with its own retrieval expectation.
Production does not stop at six, so neither does the cover.
A restore test on a schedule, not a green tick in a console.
The three that come up every time
Not an exhaustive list. These are the ones that show up in the first conversation on almost every media engagement, and the ones the service is shaped around.
A deadline that does not move
Transmission, publication and delivery dates are fixed before the work starts, so an outage is measured in missed slots rather than in minutes.
Recovery targets are set per system against the deadline each one serves, rather than one number for the estate.
The slot is made.
Archive that grows faster than the budget
Storage expands with every project and is never retired, because nobody wants to be the person who deleted the wrong master.
Tiering and retention are agreed explicitly, with retrieval times stated per tier.
Cost tracks what you actually need back quickly.
Backups that have never been restored
A backup job completing is not evidence that the material comes back. For media estates, the difference is measured in days.
Restores are tested on a schedule and the result is reported.
You know it works before you need it to.
The parts of the service that do the work
Nothing here is specific to this sector. These are the same families described across the site, scoped to what a media estate actually needs.
Managed IT Services
Storage, network and systems, with backup verification and restore testing as part of the service.
Application Management
Publishing platforms, web estates and the pipelines that move material between them.
AI Solutions
Metadata, search and generative AI work where an archive has to be findable rather than merely kept.
Managed Business Services
Back-office operations around rights, billing and order processing.
Shaped to the sector, not relabelled for it
The delivery model is the same one described on the service pages: one accountable team, one ticket queue, a monthly service review. What changes for this sector is where the attention goes and how the work is scheduled.
Everything below is a working practice rather than a promise. If one of them would not survive contact with your estate, say so in the first call and we will tell you what it would take.
Talk to an expert- Recovery scoped per systemEach platform gets a recovery target set against the deadline it serves. One number for the whole estate would be wrong for most of it.
- Restores tested, not assumedBackups are proven by restoring them on a schedule, and the result is in the monthly report whether or not it was good.
- Retention agreed, not inheritedTiering and retention are decided deliberately, so storage growth is a choice rather than a consequence.
Scope and targets are set after discovery, against the estate as it stands.
Before you send an RFP
Do you support broadcast and production hardware?
The IT estate around it: storage, network, servers, the platforms and the integrations. Vendor-certified production hardware stays with the vendors who certify it, and we hold the boundary between the two.
How do you handle archive retrieval times?
They are agreed per tier during discovery and written into the service, because a retrieval expectation that was never stated is one that will be wrong at the worst moment.
Can you cover a live production window?
Yes, and those windows are treated as planned high-risk periods rather than as ordinary hours. They are staffed deliberately and no change is scheduled across them.
What if our storage is already past its budget?
Then the first useful piece of work is tiering and retention rather than more capacity. We will show you what is being kept at working-tier cost that nobody has opened in a year, and what moving it would save.
Tell us thedeadline.
The one that cannot move. We will work backwards from it to the recovery times the estate actually needs, and tell you where it stands today.