Sesame Workshop Supports Key Digitization Efforts and Moves to the Cloud with Rubrik

Overview

Sesame Workshop is the nonprofit educational organization behind Sesame Street, the longest-running children’s show in American television history. Sesame Workshop is an innovative force for change with a mission to help children everywhere grow smarter, stronger, and kinder. The organization is present in 150 countries, serving children through a wide range of media, formal education, and philanthropicallyfunded social impact programs.

Shadrach Kisten, Chief Technology Officer, is responsible for developing the overall technology and engineering vision in addition to driving cross-company technology initiatives to meet business objectives. “Our team is small, but efficient and effective. We can accomplish great things with the relevant technology, which is why we partner with best-of-breed solutions like Rubrik,” said Kisten. “I’ve been in the media space for 18 years, and I’m very excited about Rubrik. Not only does the solution fit nicely into our company initiatives, but also there’s immense potential for the future.” 

Solutions

Increased productivity and more time for strategic initiatives

Sesame Workshop delivers its content to homes around the world by utilizing TV and other digital media platforms. One of its key Technology and Engineering initiatives was to have a backup/archive strategy to align with its business objectives of separating backup functions of IT and video systems. This revolves around the backup and archiving of 45 years of their intellectual properties.

“This will allow us to have our assets readily available, enabling us to be more effective and efficient as we expand our reach and engagement to multiple platforms across the domestic and international markets,” said Kisten. “This is what digital transformation is all about and our Rubrik implementation was an enabler for all of this.” 

"Prior to Rubrik, our legacy tape-based solution required two full-time employees to manage. We only spend 2-3 hours per week checking Rubrik, which means we have additional productivity hours back to the business per week. Our team is using that time to focus on working closely with business stakeholders to continuously improve the business workflow and drive adoption of new technology we’re onboarding.”

"One of our goals is to shift the team to a DevOps skill set in order to enhance efficiency and effectiveness. Since Rubrik requires almost no management, we can focus on key engineering projects instead. Rubrik’s REST APIs will be integral in allowing us to automate multiple aspects of our data management functions. For example, we’re planning to integrate Rubrik with our ticketing system to automate file restores without the need for human intervention.” 

Fast track to cloud with Rubrik and Azure

With their digitization, backup and archiving strategy, Kisten and team needed to figure out how to store these files in a way that was easily accessible by producers, curators and editors. “We knew we needed to adopt a cloud-first strategy and integrate our digital properties with the best cloud offerings available. The agility will allow us to reuse our content all across the world,” said Kisten. “We had to build a scalable, integrated cloud infrastructure with an automated workflow.”

“We edit all of our assets locally, but we need a place to archive them. If we were storing these on-prem, we’d have to expand our real estate and storage arrays. We knew we’d have to utilize public cloud for long-term retention, but our previous solution prevented us from doing so. With Rubrik, we will be able to archive to Azure for 90 days and then push the data into Azure Blob for cold storage. It only takes a few clicks to restore, which is a massive win.”