For years, “move it to the cloud” sounded like the obvious answer to every storage problem. It promised simplicity, scalability, and freedom from hardware headaches. For a while, that worked. But in the media and entertainment world, where every shoot seems to generate another few hundred terabytes, reality has caught up with the marketing.
Bills have ballooned, egress fees frighten, and compliance rules are more demanding than ever. Now the pendulum is swinging back. Many facilities are rediscovering the power of running their own private cloud and taking control of their storage destiny.
Let us explore five reasons why.
1. Cloud Smart, Not Cloud First
Public cloud storage is great for collaboration, remote workflows, and short-term projects. Editors on opposite sides of the world can share timelines in seconds, and producers can review clips on an iPad.
But when the job delivers and those assets need to live somewhere for years, the cloud suddenly looks less attractive. The cost of keeping terabytes online indefinitely, plus the egress fees whenever someone needs to restore footage, adds up quickly.
That’s why the new thinking isn’t “cloud first” but “cloud smart.” Keep using cloud for what it’s good at, but pull long-term assets back into private infrastructure where cost and control are predictable.
2. Predictable Economics Beat Surprise Bills
Anyone who’s opened a detailed cloud invoice knows the feeling: “How can downloading our own footage cost this much?” Cloud OPEX starts small, but as archives grow, the monthly line items never stop.
Private infrastructure flips that model. Once you’ve invested in storage tiers you control, the cost per terabyte stays stable for years. You can plan a five-year budget without crossing your fingers.
For M&E companies, where project data never really dies, this matters. 4K, 8K and multi-camera workflows mean petabytes accumulate fast. Owning storage capacity becomes far cheaper in the long run than renting it forever.
3. Elasticity isn’t Exclusive to the Cloud
Cloud vendors brag about “infinite elasticity”, the more you use the more you pay. There’s no requirement to specify how much is needed, one just pays for what is used. But adding another 18 or 30-terabyte LTO cartridge to a tape library also scales your storage capacity, with one important difference: you own the cartridge.
A well-planned LTO library can scale almost without limit, adding tapes as needed while keeping running costs tiny. It’s effectively infinite capacity, just in tidy, labelled boxes instead of invisible data centres. Also the data ownership is tangible and you can decide where to store the LTO tapes.
In media archives, this kind of elasticity makes perfect sense. You can expand on demand, control physical security, and still access content when needed. With modern automation and software, it’s every bit as flexible as the cloud, just more economical.
4. LTO + S3: The Future of Archive
When it comes to genuine long-term retention, there’s really only one game in town. LTO is literally the only cost-effective, proven medium for long-term archive storage. Disk and cloud both have value, but neither can match tape for durability, capacity, or cost per terabyte over decades.
And here’s where things get interesting. The future of archive is no longer a choice between “tape” or “S3 object storage.” It’s both.
Archiware P5’s S3 Object Archive allows an LTO library to be presented as an S3 bucket. In other words, your tapes become part of a private cloud, accessible through the same S3 protocol used by Amazon and others. Any S3-aware application, including MAM systems, can write to it.
This means facilities can build their own long-term object store on-prem, with the same API and workflow compatibility as public cloud storage. It’s a best-of-both-worlds scenario: cloud convenience, tape economics.
For the foreseeable future, S3 is the interface, and LTO is the medium. The only difference is who hosts the LTO. You can pay a cloud vendor to store LTO on your behalf, or you can do it yourself — often at a fraction of the cost, and with total control.
5. Hybrid Workflows offer a balanced and efficient strategy
No one is abandoning the cloud entirely. It’s still brilliant for collaboration, compute, and AI workloads. But long-term media management now lives in a hybrid world where data flows seamlessly between cloud and on-prem tiers.
A typical M&E setup might look like this:
- High-speed local storage handles current production work.
- Cloud storage supports global review and temporary sharing/collaboration.
- Completed projects move to a private LTO-based archive.
MAM systems are perfectly at home in this hybrid model. Most can point to any S3 endpoint, whether it’s hosted by Amazon, Wasabi, or right there in your own rack. To the MAM, it’s all just S3. To you, it’s the difference between renting storage forever and owning it outright.
A More Grounded Cloud
There’s nothing old-fashioned about running storage on-prem anymore. Modern private-cloud infrastructure looks and behaves just like its public counterpart. It’s built on S3-compatible object storage and data-management tools. The only real difference is the invoice.
Many media companies are discovering that the smartest “cloud strategy” involves bringing at least part of the cloud back home. It’s greener, cheaper, faster to restore from, and infinitely easier to audit.
And for those who still want the simplicity of S3 but the economics of tape, presenting an LTO library as a private S3 archive is a neat trick that removes any connectivity issues.
Conclusion: Owning the Future
Data repatriation isn’t about rejecting the cloud. It’s about choosing the right home for your data based on workflow, value, and time constraints. For M&E companies, long-term archive is a different animal from day-to-day production. It demands permanence, predictability, and protection from both cyber-risk, billing shocks and unwanted lock-in.
LTO remains the only medium that truly delivers those qualities. And by combining it with the S3 protocol, the industry now has the perfect hybrid: cloud-native access with private-cloud economics.
LTO hardware and Archiware P5 software, form a solution that’s purchased and owned outright. No monthly payments, your data is not hostage to cloud invoices.
The choice is simple. You can keep paying someone else to host your LTO — or you can run your own private cloud and have it pay off, for years to come.
