Three questions to determine if your org is ready for an active archive

Driving value from your archive is a compelling promise. But how do you know if your organization is actually positioned to succeed with an active archive? 

Many active archive attempts aren’t successful because organizations discover (too late!) that their infrastructure, processes, or economics can't support the transformation. The result is expensive migrations that stall, searchable archives where nothing can be found, or accessible content libraries that don't generate the promised ROI.

Wasabi and Iconik have published a comprehensive framework addressing these challenges: "Unlocking Your Archive (And Your Revenue): Turning Stored Media into Active Assets." The guide details a 10-step  roadmap for organizations ready to make the transition. 

Before you dive in, these three diagnostic questions can help you assess whether your organization has the foundation for active archive success, or whether you need to address gaps before moving forward.

Question 1: Can your storage strategy support petabyte-scale accessibility?

The diagnostic:

• Do you currently restrict archive access due to concerns about data movement costs?
• Have you delayed projects because your current storage makes certain workflows prohibitively expensive?
• Are licensing teams unable to create client previews without triggering budget conversations?
• Does collaboration require downloading files locally because your current storage model makes streaming impractical?

Why storage strategy matters:

Active archives only work when storage economics align with how teams actually use content. The challenge isn't just storing petabytes; it's making that content accessible for licensing previews, marketing reviews, collaborative sessions, and external partnerships without raising costs or burdening your IT infrastructure.

Different storage strategies create different costs and benefits. Cloud providers with egress fees require modeling data transfer costs against usage patterns. On-premise infrastructure demands weigh capital investment against control and performance needs. Zero-egress cloud storage offers predictable costs with varying feature sets. Hybrid approaches balance complexity against optimization opportunities.

The key question isn't "Which storage is best?" but rather, "Does your storage strategy enable or constrain the workflows that generate value from archived content?"

The solution framework: 

How you structure your storage depends on your company goals and scale. Iconik takes a flexible approach to storage architecture, enabling active archiving regardless of where media is stored.

Iconik’s architecture activates archives wherever content lives – across AWS, Azure, GCP, Wasabi, on-premise storage, or any combination – without forcing migration. For organizations using cloud providers with egress fees, Iconik's proxy-first architecture minimizes data transfer costs by generating lightweight proxies locally and streaming those for collaboration, keeping high-resolution masters in place.

For organizations seeking to eliminate variable egress costs entirely, Wasabi's hot cloud storage offers an alternative economic model at $6.99/TB/month, with zero egress fees and no API charges, thereby transforming storage into a predictable fixed expense rather than a variable cost tied to business activity.

The framework's value lies in its flexibility: proxy workflows reduce costs on any storage platform, while organizations can optionally consolidate to zero-egress providers, maintain on-premise control for sensitive content, or mix approaches across different media types.

Assessment: If storage costs are limiting your ability to work with your archives, Wasabi's whitepaper details how hybrid cloud architectures enable organizations to activate content wherever it lives, without forced migration, while optimizing storage economics for your business. 

Question 2: Does your metadata strategy scale alongside content demand or collapse under it?

The diagnostic:

• How long does it take your team to locate a specific 10-second clip from last year's content library?
• What percentage of your archive would you estimate is "dark data" – content that exists but can't realistically be found?
• Do licensing requests require dedicated staff to hunt through folders for hours or days?
• Are your editors still manually tagging content and falling further behind every quarter?

Why metadata matters:

Content is growing 36% year-over-year across enterprise deployments. Organizations creating 3-5x more content than five years ago discover that manual metadata processes can't keep pace. The result isn't just inefficiency; it's the expansion of "dark data" that undermines the entire active archive value proposition.

The Wasabi/Iconik framework captures this with the "10-second rule": if your team can't locate a specific clip in under 10 seconds, you don't have an active archive. You have an expensive file system with a search box.

Manual tagging fails at scale in ways that better process discipline can't fix. Teams create inconsistent terminology ("NYC skyline" vs "New York aerial" vs "Manhattan cityscape"), only tag hero shots (leaving valuable B-roll undiscoverable), and physically cannot tag fast enough to keep pace with annual content growth. The metadata gap widens every quarter.

Dark data becomes a licensing liability when you can't track content usage or prove compliance. It's a direct revenue leak when licensing teams can't find footage that clients would pay for immediately.

The solution framework:

Organizations that successfully activate archives at scale rely on AI-driven metadata alongside manual tagging as foundational infrastructure; a proven and scalable solution to massive annual content growth. The Wasabi whitepaper’s AI metadata section details how AI-driven automation transforms dark data into searchable assets through automated transcription, visual content recognition, and standardized taxonomy, covered in the tagging, organization, and automation deployment steps.

The benefit isn't just speed; it's creating a legally defensible index that supports critical business needs, such as compliance verification, rights tracking, and multi-territory licensing.

Assessment:

‍ If your team struggles with the 10-second rule or you’re experiencing discovery bottlenecks, the AI metadata strategies in the Wasabi whitepaper detail how to scale searchability alongside content velocity, so you don’t fall further behind each quarter.

Question 3: Do your workflows enable revenue generation or just file access?

The diagnostic:

• How many licensing deals does your team decline because content fulfillment takes too long?
• Do marketing approvals require downloading massive files and routing feedback through email?
• Can non-technical stakeholders (licensing teams, external partners, clients) actually work with archived content or just view it?
• Does every licensing request require post-production support to create sub-clips and client previews?

Why licensing and repurposing workflows  matter:

Active archives are financially justified by converting dormant assets into revenue through licensing archival footage, repurposing content across platforms, and accelerating sponsored content production, among other strategies. However, this only works if the people who generate revenue can actually access, discuss, and use the content without relying on technical gatekeepers.

The gap between "file access" and "revenue-enabling workflows" is where active archive business cases collapse. Consider a sports league with 20 years of game footage. That’s millions in licensing value. But if every deal requires IT support for clip creation, storage engineering for client delivery, and manual file prep for preview packages, the economics don't scale. Each deal requiring technical support means lower margins and slower sales cycles, which means fewer deals closed.

The solution framework:

Revenue-generating archives require a production-grade collaboration infrastructure that enables self-service clip creation, fully featured review and approval workflows, and unified collaboration, bringing together legal teams, clients, and external partners within a single system. When collaborative workflows are combined with economically sustainable storage – whether through optimization of existing infrastructure or zero-egress models like Wasabi – your organization can unlock unlimited external reviews and partnership collaborations without the cost constraints that limit business development.

Assessment:

If licensing workflows currently require technical gatekeepers, you may be missing out on revenue. The collaboration architecture patterns outlined in the Wasabi whitepaper demonstrate how to  enable licensing and partnership teams to work together around content, which is critical for scaling revenue generation.

Why these three questions can start helping to determine success

Each of these assessment areas – storage strategy, metadata scalability, and collaboration around content licensing – represents a common failure point where active archive deployments stall, overspend, or fail to deliver ROI.

Organizations that answer "yes, we have this covered" to all three questions are positioned to implement robust, usable, and revenue-generating archives. And those who discover gaps? You can address them strategically before committing to expensive migrations or deployment timelines.

Wasabi’s whitepaper addresses these architectural foundations simultaneously: 

• Storage flexibility that works with existing infrastructure or optimizes costs through zero-egress providers
• Hybrid architecture that activates content wherever it lives
• AI-driven metadata that scales with content growth
• Production-grade collaboration that transforms archives into revenue-generating infrastructure

Download the complete guide

‍Get "Unlocking Your Archive (And Your Revenue): Turning Stored Media into Active Assets" for the full 10-step implementation framework, including architecture diagrams, workflow integrations, and deployment patterns from organizations that have successfully transformed stored media into active revenue-generating assets. Download the whitepaper

See the technology in action

Explore how Iconik's hybrid cloud MAM platform enables active archives through live demonstrations of AI metadata automation, collaborative review workflows, and storage-agnostic deployment across any infrastructure. Book a demo

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