At first glance, the largest Fortune 500 enterprises in healthcare, financial services, automobile, retail, manufacturing, among others seem to have nothing in common. They operate in disparate industries with distinct business challenges. Yet, structurally, they are very much alike. They all comprise of sizeable multi-unit or multi-divisional departments that make up the enterprise.
Look at Amazon. It owns more than 100 companies, has 18 tech hubs within North America and 100s of fulfillment centers across the globe. All these must have a variety of functional departments. Most of these business units or departments operate independently of one another, dispersed across geographical boundaries. Most global organizations are in a similar situation.
As a result, these departmental units need business platforms over which they have independent rights for defining administration policies, access controls, branding, security, compliance, and even data storage.
With video becoming a necessity for organizations large and small, various departmental units across companies utilize video for a variety of purposes, including:
- Corporate Communication
- Training and Learning
- Knowledge Management
- Video Archival
- Marketing and Sales
- Live Events
- And much more
Imagine an organization like Amazon dumping all this variety of videos with different security needs in a single video portal. What a mess would that look like. How will you ensure that your confidential videos don't fall in the wrong hands? Your team will also be constantly bombarded with so much content that they have no use for.
What you need is an enterprise video content management system that not only allows you to stream these live and on-demand videos but also allows you to efficiently manage these videos by segregating them into multiple autonomous YouTube-like video portals - each with its own user base. These can have custom security policies.
Not only this but such a video platform also has the ability to empower each department/division's video portal to define their independent portal management policies, access controls, user groupings, portal branding, video encoding and streaming profiles, compliance, and much more.
In some cases, departments located across various regional geographic sites may also require their specific video portal to be hosted in their regional cloud or on-premises data centers. A flexible video platform can definitely make that happen!
Additionally, with varying video usage across departments, the video portals would also need to be licensed separately for their video consumption costs for bandwidth, cloud or on-premises storage, and so on. It is definitely is a must for your platform to have separate billing for these independent video portals.
But you may wonder how a video platform can facilitate such deep portal-level segregation and autonomy - the answer to which is multi-tenancy. VIDIZMO is a unique multi-tenant enterprise video platform that supports the creation of these multiple autonomous video portals with all the functionalities mentioned above.
Let us explore what exactly is multi-tenancy and how do these independent video portals benefit your organization.
What is a Multi-tenant Enterprise Video Platform?
In a multi-tenant video platform, the same application is deployed in a number of independent (not pooled) instances. This has to do with complete media and user segregation that provides portal-level autonomy for defining all portal management policies, branding, streaming, hosting, licensing, etc. to meet department-specific privacy, security and compliance needs. As a result, the portals and their data sets don’t touch, interact and are not viewable together in any combination or instance, unless it is required that way.
Why your organization needs a multi-tenancy video platform?
An organization needs multi-tenancy video portals for different stakeholders or interdepartmental use in the following scenarios:
- Horizontal department portals for marketing, HR, T&L, finance, IT, communications, others
- Vertical department portals for departments managing various business products or service
- Geographically dispersed portals across regional, national, or international business units
- Internal vs. external portals for employees, external partners, customers, investors, etc.
A large banking institution, for instance, has a wide range of internal departments for treasury, risk management, inspection, IT, personnel, communications, and so on as well as customer products and services such as cards, membership rewards, travel, mortgage, leasing, etc. for private individuals and businesses – all of which is often dispersed across global or regions offices.
Depending on how the departments are structured, many or all of these departments would need completely independent portals for their particular video communication, training, marketing or video management needs.
In the absence of a multi-tenancy video platform, each department would have to purchase a separate instance of the platform, which incurs an insurmountable cost and inevitable management inefficiencies, not to mention the IT compliance challenges.
To resolve this, a multi-tenancy video platform presents a simple, cost-effective solution deployable across the organization in a single installation of dedicated multi-tenant portals.
Understanding how multi-tenancy video platform works
A video platform with a true multi-tenant environment offers video portals that have deep levels of autonomy for administration, governance, and regulation. This includes the ability for each portal administrator to have independent rights to define policies as per their departmental guidelines for administration, management, and compliance, in addition to providing complete segregation of the users and video and other digital media content across the portals.
In essence, a multi-tenancy video platform would have to offer the following capabilities at a portal level:
- Separate branding guidelines – departments managing different products or services with entirely different branding or corporate identity guidelines can apply unique branding on different portals - bringing their own flair to life.
- Separate single sign-on integration – various departments should be able to integrate their active directories using whichever single sign-on protocol or ID management tool used in their particular unit. For an external user portal, you should be able to integrate using third-party authentication via Outlook 365, Google, Facebook, etc. or enable anonymous users.
- Separate security policies – each portal administrator should be able to define their platform security policies for SSO, multi-factor authentication, encryption, IP/domain restrictions, location restriction, URL restrictions/tokenization, DRM, access controls, among others.
- Separate roles and permissions – different portals should be able to define their user access rights and access controls over which users can access which portal functionalities for uploading, sharing, moderating or viewing content – and which ones cannot.
- Separate integrations – each portal should allow users to employ any necessary platform integrations such as a corporate CRM integration for marketing, LMS integration for training and learning, CMS and video conferencing integration for the communications department (or a mix), and so on. You could also have separate accounts of the same integrations attached to different video portals.
- Separate administration policies – each department should be able to set their portal administration policies or permissions for specific features or functions such as enabling interactivity, blocking downloads, moderation workflows, reporting, video sharing options, etc.
- Separate data storage – different departments might want to store their media in their particular geographic storage server locations, and a multi-tenant video platform should enable different storage options for varying departmental needs.
- Separate portal hosting – every portal should allow distributed geographical hosting for optimized video delivery via the most proximate CDNs so a team in America can host their portal in US data centers while the teams in China can host videos in their particular portal in their regional data centers.
- Separate licensing – each portal should have independent licensing capabilities to charge a specific department for their expenses incurred for video storage, encoding, live streaming, bandwidth consumption, etc. This helps maintain accounting and financial segregation across departments.
- Separate audit logs – each portal should be able to maintain separate audit logs to monitor all activity within the portal, including data regarding who accessed the portal, when, from where (IP-level details), what content was shared or deleted by whom, and more.
VIDIZMO | An Intelligent Multi-tenancy Enterprise video platform
VIDIZMO offers a unique Gartner-recognized enterprise video platform with multi-tenancy capabilities that beats all our competitors in the enterprise video content management space.
It has been designed by keeping in mind the distinct needs of large organizations for security, compliance, independent management, administration, etc. in different horizontal and vertical departments within an organization.
This flexible platform allows you to create independent, self-sufficient video portals - secure and YouTube-like. The video platform addresses the precise multi-tenancy needs of large organizations by providing the following autonomous administration options for each portal:
Unique portal administration policies
Unique portal branding
Unique portal single sign-on integration (AD integration)
Unique user access management and role-based permissions
Unique encoding profiles
Unique streaming servers/policies
Unique media storage options (locations & ECDN)
Unique geographical hosting options
Unique compliance requirements
Independent audit logs and other platform security options
Unique third-party platform integrations
Separate licensing
Having said that, a portal can also inherit the same administration policies, branding, compliance, storage, hosting, licensing etc. as the main platform - depending on what you require or prefer.
None of the other video platforms in the enterprise video content management market have multi-tenancy features comparable to that of VIDIZMO. They only allow limited content segregation and user access in basic folders and channels without granting the ability of multiple portal creation with the above-mentioned autonomous capabilities.
For further details about VIDIZMO multi-tenancy video platform, contact us today or opt for a free trial to experience the capabilities yourself!
