How Higher Education Can Leverage Data Lakes to Manage the Onslaught of Video and Digital Media Content

The good news for administrators is that data is and can stay a college or university’s friend, helping record and distribute lectures, capture information, streamline processes and create more efficient systems for managing information. The key, of course, is ensuring your organization has proper storage, management and security/compliance protocols. 

Here are some top tips to working with large amounts of data, particularly video data:

Ensure Your Platforms Are Scalable

Ensuring your platforms are scalable and that your organization is using the right platform for each data type is important. Basic file management systems, like Learning Management Software (LMS) platforms, are inadequate for storing video content. That’s because video files are large, which means not only do they take up a lot of space on your device, they also require a lot of bandwidth to send, download or stream. To handle video content, make sure you have a system designed for video content management. 

Make Sure You’re Using the Right Platform for Each Data Type

Similarly, Zoom isn’t an ideal storage space for video data. The YuJa Video Content Management System (Video CMS) enables organizations to store, manage, and stream media content both inside-and-outside their enterprise with a scalable platform designed for your organization.

If your organization is saving files strictly for compliance reasons, it’s best to turn to an e-discovery and storage compliance solution like YuJa Himalayas, where institutions can store data lakes in a searchable, compliant and cost-effective manner.  

What Are Data Lakes and How to Manage Them

Data lakes are central repositories for internal, external, structured and unstructured data accumulated from a variety of sources. Organizations can store data in its original form, thereby allowing the flexibility to analyze and build optimized data architectures. This makes it not only possible, but simple for IT professionals, administrators and others to efficiently and quickly extract insights from enterprise data.

 

According to recent Aberdeen research study, the average company is seeing the volume of their data grow at a rate that exceeds 50% per year. The same study noted that organizations who implemented a Data Lake outperforming similar companies by 9% in organic revenue growth.

 

Tools that help organizations identify regulatory and corporate compliance risks in video, audio, and documents are optimal for managing large volumes of data. These tools can provide searchable transcriptions of spoken words, and optical character recognition (OCR) of screen content.

How a Security and Compliance Solution Can Help

As organizations scale video and audio collaboration, the challenge of compliance makes it difficult to increase usage within regulated sectors. YuJa Himalayas provide a unified Platform to review and search video conference recordings, analyze and search visual content, and provide compliant archiving of video content. 

Your institution’s video can be integrated into existing compliance programs, whether it’s data archiving, storage tiering, visual search, policy management or automated ingestion. Himalayas automatically provides tools to identify regulatory and corporate compliance risks in video, audio, and documents by providing the searchable transcriptions of spoken words and optical character recognition (OCR) of screen content. Additionally, YuJa Inc. is a SOC 2-compliant firm achieving the highest standard for corporate and information technology (IT) governance.

Effective Technology for Managing Your Institutional Retention Policy

Storing Your Institution’s Digital Content

In an age where much of your institution’s content is created and stored digitally, finding a storage repository that meets your needs affordably has become a challenge. At YuJa, we recognized the issue institutions were facing. Not only were university and college officials being forced to either find individual videos, download and then delete them from the platform they used to create it — a manual and laborious process — or to pay additional fees for using video conferencing products as a repository.

YuJa offers a Data Management tool within the Video Platform that enables administrators to create data policies to archive content based on views, type, user and date of upload. Another tool, YuJa Himalayas for Digital Compliance, allows you to identify compliance issues, manage risks and enables e-discovery scenarios. 

Data Retention and Management Policies Support Video Life Cycle Management

Administrators can create and enforce data management policies within the Data Management tab of the Admin Panel. Administrators can define one or more policies that enable bulk data review capabilities, as well as data governance of an institution’s video repository.

Using the Video Platform’s Data Management, content managers can: 

• Define customized data policies to automatically govern how content is archived, retrieved, purged or segmented
• Review and search video conference recordings
• Analyze and search visual content
• Archive content in the cloud affordably

Data Management Policies Help Automate and Streamline Workflows 

The Data Management panel enables the creation, editing, deletion and execution of data administration policies to identify specific data subsets.  This content can be deleted, downloaded (individually or in bulk) or archived. Each policy can specify multiple rules including:

• Content added before a specific date
• Content added before a certain number of days
• Content added by specific users
• The exclusion of specific user content
• Type of content created
• Media not viewed for a specific amount of days

Successful Management Saves Terabytes of Data

Several institutions have implemented various rule types to save both time and money in data storage and management costs. 

• The University of North Dakota was able to reduce its overall storage by 24 terabytes (TBs) by creating a rule to find and remove all student videos created prior to a certain date. The policy was created using a combination of custom rules YuJa supports, including video content owned by student rule types along with content without any views within a 180-day period.
• HEC Montreal found 17 TBs of content that did not have a single end-user view within a 60-day period. They created a policy based on YuJa’s custom role policy to track and filter unviewed content. 
• MSU Denver archived more than 14 TBs of content based on a 548/548 rule. The institutional policy allowed them to find videos that were both uploaded 548 days ago and that had no views within a 548-day period and archived those videos 

For more information on how to set up data management policies, view our support article with step-by-step instructions.