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Roles

These are the roles that are needed:

  • Admin
  • Read storage
  • Write storage
  • Reindex storage

On-premise files and Cloud storage

You can mix and match storages in different locations easily with iconik. Many of our customers have on-premise and cloud storage and want to iconik to manage files in both places. This is fundamental to iconik's Hybrid Cloud approach and provides a lot of flexibility:

Advantages

  • Use existing investments in on-premise storage.
  • Make files that are on-premise globally accessible to your users as needed.
  • Archive to cloud
  • Allow remote working
  • Benefit from fast access locally to on-premise storage and have the ability to pull those files into the cloud as needed.

Designing hybrid cloud setup.

These steps are typically steps that our customers go through when designing a Hybrid approach:

  1. Understand where your users will be accessing files. Whether this is 100% remote, 100% in the office or a mixture of both.
  2. Gather future requirements for files and their accessibility.
  3. Work out which on-premise devices you will need to make accessible. If you are purchasing equipment consider using storage devices that run the iconik Storage Gateway natively.
  4. Gather requirements for archive.
  5. Build an overview of a design of workflow of how your users typically work with files.
  6. Gather any requirements for Review and Approve with users external to your normal organization.
  7. Understand what User Groups you have in your organization and any need to keep their content separate or if they share freely between the teams.

Even if you are not starting scratch or not planning on making major changes, iconik can introduce an organization to new possibilities in working with files without the boundaries normally associated with on-premise storage or the transfer costs associated with a 100% cloud deployment. So it's worth going through the exercise to see if there is any immediate changes to be made or some future plans can be put in place.

Once you have gathered those requirements it's time to see how to how that maps to iconik.

  1. On-premise storage such as SANs, NAS and file servers can utilise the iconik Storage Gateway. Typically it's one iconik Storage Gateway per storage device. This can run on MacOS, Windows, Linux and on some storage devices such as TrueNAS.
  2. Users that move around a lot or are creating a lot of video remotely can also utilise their own iconik Storage Gateway which can be installed on their laptops.
  3. Any requirements for Cloud Storage as a main files storage area. If you already have an existing Cloud Infrastructure provider or indeed cloud storage you can utilise this and setup additional buckets as needed. If you don't want to deal with Cloud infrastructure providers but need cloud storage we can provide this to you.
  4. If you want more than one Cloud Storage (such as one per team) this is also possible and can be configured with ACLs per storage that set which users or user groups are allowed access to that storage.
  5. Archive Cloud buckets can be setup to create longer term archive of files that are not often needed - and this could be tiered on to a different cloud provider, or a different level of storage from your cloud provider (i.e. Glacier Backed S3 Storage from AWS).
  6. If you have a lot of Users and User Groups you may wish to integration iconik with an Identity Provider that uses SAML instead of setting up all Users and User Groups directly in iconik.
  7. Try and work out if there are files on your file system that you don't need in iconik. Typically these include cache files, .DS_Store, NLE temporary files, but could also include complete directories.
  8. Build a diagram of how it all looks.

Setting it up.

Once you have done the design work, it's easy to get started with building out in iconik whether you want to start off small and do small trials or have enough experience to go straight to production iconik is un-intrusive in it's approach.

We recommend for larger installations to build out small tests using a cloud bucket that doesn't contain any production assets, and running the ISG on some storage separate from your main production area to get a feeling of how to configure iconik and how it works.

  1. If you are going to be setting up an identity provider this is a logical place to start. See the instructions on how to set this up here
  2. Create any cloud storage that you need in your cloud infrastructure provider. To understand any requirements visit the Adding Storage documentation.
  3. Start adding the cloud storage to iconik. Adding Storage Page. For most storages this will be of the purpose Files but if you are setting up an archive storage then use the Archive storage purpose.
  4. If you want iconik collections created from your storage] you should turn on Collection Directory Mapping - this will create a collection for each directory on your storage in a tree structure as found, and map the iconik assets to those collections automatically. This can be done from the editing screen under Scan Settings.
  5. If you probably have file duplicates and need to watch out for duplicate files in the future, turn on Consider identical files the same. This can be done from the editing screen under Scan Settings.
  6. If you have files or directories that shouldn't be shown in iconik these can be configured for ignoring in the editing screen under Scan Settings.
  7. When you have files on cloud storage, and you wish to get previews and keyframes you need to have a transcoder configured for that storage. These can be configured for ignoring in the editing screen under Transcode Settings.
  8. If you require that only certain user groups can use certain storage devices, or access certain files:
    1. ACL templates can be used for each User Group that requires unique access to the files that come from a particular storage. Any new file that comes from a storage with an ACL Template applied (see editing storage for your particular storage) will then get this ACL applied to it - controlling who can see it. So create the ACL Templates and then apply to the storage. Each storage can have one ACL template.
    2. Storage ACLS can be used to control who has access to use an upload or access a particular storage and useful for restricting who can interact with a particular storage.
    3. Configure Default Storage and ACL Template to use for each User Group. The default storage controls where a user's files get uploaded to if using the web uploader or our NLE integration, and the ACL Template defines which ACLs are applied to those files.
  9. If you have requirements for making on-premise storage available or someone is working remotely that transfers a lot of files, then you can move on to installing iconik Storage Gateways by following the documentation for your operating system.
  10. Configure the iconik Storage Gateway in the same as with Cloud Storage with ACL Templates and Storage ACLs
  11. If you have a cloud storage that iconik needs to periodically read from to check for new files setup scanning so that you don't have to manually perform scans. If it needs doing just once, then a manual scan can be performed.

And done!

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