One of the recurring themes that came up over the studio’s many industry consultations over the years was a major restriction not well understood outside of industry. Catalogue digital assets must not leave the internal network for legal reasons. This is a deal breaker for many.
The Helios architecture factored this otherwise catastrophic legal constraint into its architectural design from inception. Customers get their own copy to run locally on their own network and, if they choose, to serve requests inside or outside of it.
Besides the legal reason, there are a number of other technical and financial reasons. If you needed to send your music outside of your network, you would normally be expected to pay hosting fees to a third party to “manage” redundant data you already have.
For many, such as digital music libraries and record labels as examples, as if the legalities weren’t already reason enough, uploading tens of terabytes or petabytes of digital audio over the internet to a third party’s storage facility is simply not practical. The fastest commercial broadband connections available can still only control the width of the pipe between you and your ISP. What’s beyond that is entirely beyond your ISP’s control.
When your costly digital assets do not need to leave your network any good insurer worth their salt will reduce your premiums because the architecture is a wonderful risk mitigation strategy when your entire business revolves around your digital assets.
If the service you built around Helios instead required access to a centralized hosted platform we controlled and there were internet connectivity issues one day that were not your fault, your system would be crippled. Your customers would not be able to find the music they need.
Further, consider the scenario where internet connectivity wasn’t an issue, but for whatever reason the centralized hosted solution is taken offline at our end for any reason. The entire service would be rendered useless, not simply localized to a single business.
