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June 03, 2024

MediaValet minimizes The Jane Goodall Institute’s carbon footprint with the help of Microsoft Azure

Jane Goodall Institute

In collaboration with Microsoft and MediaValet, the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) is working to manage 60-years of materials equating to over 1.5 million assets and enabling global access to JGI chapters and stakeholders worldwide.

Jane Goodall Institute (JGI), founded by Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, and UN Messenger of Peace, is a nonprofit organization committed to science-driven and community-centered conservation specifically focused on protecting chimpanzees and preserving the planet. The institute has been at the forefront of research on chimpanzees for over six decades, contributing significantly to the world’s knowledge about these incredible primates and the challenges they face. The institute’s efforts extend beyond research to include environmental restoration and protection, highlighting the interconnectedness of human and animal well-being.

Through their work, Jane and JGI have amassed thousands of hours of footage, photos and handwritten notes, diagrams, and sketches. Previously these assets were limited in their accessibility having been stored in places like hard drives, storage cabinets, and local servers. Now, more than 1.5 million assets, and growing, are digitized in MediaValet and more searchable and accessible than ever.

Determining a global technology solution

Digital Asset Management (DAM) companies help enterprises to search, discover and share digital content both internally and externally. By enabling the delivery of content-at-scale, the DAM creates a force-multiplier for marketing by driving content ROI and generating business impact. Over the last decade, the volume of content that these enterprises need to create, use, and manage has increased. Millions of photos, videos, and creative and marketing assets can spread across multiple storage devices and services, which can result in an unsustainable carbon footprint for digital media. Along with the rise of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), companies now want to limit their carbon footprint to create a sustainable future in technology.

MediaValet, a leading provider of cloud-native enterprise DAM, video content management and creative operations software stands at the forefront of the industry. MediaValet realized the productivity problem for content creation and management needed to be addressed while also ensuring sustainability and compliance with enterprise policies relating to information, security, and governance. From inception, it sought to build a secure, hyper-scalable, and sustainable infrastructure to provide customers with best-in-class DAM. This is exactly what customers like JGI were seeking for their >110 TBs of rich and high-value photos and videos. Now, 60 years (or 17 TBs) of handwritten notes from the field and thousands of images and hours (or 36 TBs) of footage are stored in the cloud thereby reducing its carbon footprint at the same time as making it globally and instantly accessible by the organization’s global community of nonprofit and conservation professionals.

MediaValet is an industry-agnostic 100% cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) solution that goes beyond a central content hub to ensure the entire enterprise and tech stack, usually starting with the marketing department, can leverage their rich media assets securely.

A wealth of knowledge to preserve

"From our decades of footage to an extensive archive of handwritten notes, the Jane Goodall Institute holds a wealth of knowledge across a variety of media formats and locations. Taking the time to digitize these assets and improving its discoverability is an ongoing critical effort to advance the vision and work of Dr. Goodall. Among Jane’s greatest impacts is her ability to use this type of content to build compelling stories that inspire hope and action.” Shawn Sweeney, Associate Vice President of Communications & Policy at the Jane Goodall Institute said.

A primary initiative for JGI's digital asset management work was to digitize priority material, upload it to MediaValet, and apply Advanced Custom AI to help storytellers sort, process, and learn from the extensive collection of assets.

It also had to overcome barriers around: 

  • Content Storage:
    • Assets were decentralized having been stored in numerous locations 
    • Many storage locations and devices were offline and at risk of failure
  • Accessibility and Sharing:
    • Many files were inaccessible and whenever they could be located, the files often needed to be shipped between locations on thumb drives or handwritten notes
  • Carbon intensity:
    • Because of the distributed nature of their storage, they did not get to realize the carbon benefits of centralized energy efficient servers and storage.

 

To meet the growing digital demands of JGI, MediaValet was an easy choice because of its partnership with Microsoft Azure. Not only was MediaValet built on Azure, but MediaValet has been a very active Microsoft Partner since 2010. It is rated excellent under the Azure Well-Architected Framework, won the Windows Azure Partner of the Year Award in Emerging Technologies, and the Microsoft Impact Award for AI and Machine Learning. It is also a part of the ISV Success program under the new Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program.

Sustainability and Microsoft Azure technology

Beyond just a technology solution, JGI wanted a partner who valued their core strategies built around conversation, advocacy, and sustainable livelihoods. In light of the record-setting global warming, Microsoft’s sustainability pledges, and MediaValet’s excellent rating on the Well-Architected Framework, MediaValet pledged to be carbon neutral by 2025 and launched its HotDAM! For a Cool Climate (HD4CC) initiative in 2023. It took a step back to assess its effect on the environment and conducted this assessment, with the help of an expert in sustainability and zero waste. Together, they reviewed MediaValet’s carbon footprint and waste profile for all aspects of its business. The assessment included a review and calculation based on the robust resources available from Microsoft, including the Microsoft Emissions Impact Dashboard and Microsoft’s Cloud Carbon Study from 2018.

The Microsoft Azure Trust Center, documentation on responsible AI, and the Azure Emissions Impact Dashboard supported this assessment. This study led to them confirming that they could make a meaningful impact on sustainability and to the launch of their HotDAM! For a Cool Climate (HD4CC) initiative.

“The HD4CC initiative includes a fulsome assessment of our carbon footprint, a credible plan to becoming carbon neutral by 2025, and a clear understanding of how we are already helping customers with their carbon neutrality goals, today.” Rob Chase, CEO at MediaValet said.

In JGI’s case for example, MediaValet estimates that they are already able to help them reduce their carbon footprint versus their legacy infrastructure by 99% - equivalent to removing nearly 100 cars from the road every year.

Combining environment and technology

This makes MediaValet the only DAM that can meet the sustainability policy requirements that JGI requires through HD4CC.

MediaValet is a low-carbon company. So, the HD4CC initiative allows its customers to save nearly 100% of the carbon they would generate otherwise. Comparatively, even the most efficient alternative DAM solutions built by other cloud backbones could only remove up to 80%. The carbon savings generated under HD4CC are primarily a result of improved operational efficiency and best-in-class data centers built in sustainable energy locations – whereas many competitors rely on carbon offsets which are not true carbon savings.

For the JGI it means:

  • Content Storage: 
    • Majority of content is now ingested into and managed via MediaValet DAM. The data is housed in one central location with triple redundancy through Azure Blob Storage.
    • It stores, indexes, and searches asset information and metadata through Microsoft Azure data services such as Azure CosmosDB, Azure Table Storage, Azure AI Search
  • Accessibility and Sharing:
    • All content is accessible and shareable globally with an AI-enabled search opening up JGI’s rich history of photos and videos to the organization’s community of nonprofit conservation professionals
  • Security:
    • Azure Trust Center helped MediaValet in executing an information security program that achieved compliance with industry standards and provides best in class security to their customers like JGI.
  • Scalability:
    • Leveraging auto-scaling capabilities of Microsoft Azure compute services like Azure App Service and Service Fabric, MediaValet can scale the application according to JGI’s demands
  • Discoverability:
    • Using Azure AI Services such as Azure Computer Vision, Face API, Optical Character Recognition, and Video Indexer, MediaValet can enrich assets with cognitive metadata to make them discoverable even if JGI does not have the resources to manually curate the metadata

 

Together with Microsoft Azure, MediaValet and JGI are leveraging low-carbon solutions through the HD4CC initiative that meets its demands. Through these mindful decisions, this partnership is working toward creating a greener, more stainable planet.

“We…look forward to leveraging the latest in DAM, Cloud, and AI technologies to ensure our past and future photos, videos and conservation stories are not only preserved and discoverable in ways we'd never imagined, but also sustainable and readily accessible by generations to come," Sweeney said.

A greener future

MediaValet will continue to build cutting-edge features particularly for advanced cognitive services and for massive library management. It also plans to be Net Zero by 2025 and help its customers do the same. “This best-in-class focus also required selecting the right platform partner and we’re delighted to be working with Microsoft,” Chase said.

With MediaValet, the Jane Goodall Institute can take this storytelling and impact to a whole new level and have great dreams for what we can achieve with it in the future,” Sweeney said.

“From our decades of footage to an extensive archive of handwritten notes, the Jane Goodall Institute holds a wealth of knowledge across a variety of media formats and locations. Taking the time to digitize these assets and improving its discoverability is an ongoing critical effort to advance the vision and work of Dr. Goodall.”

Shawn Sweeney, Associate Vice President of Communications & Policy, Jane Goodall Institute

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