Stewardship at the forefront
By Sean Busby
Odds are you have never heard of the company DigitalGlue or its award-winning video storage
creative . space . That ’ s because DigitalGlue planned to officially launch creative . space at the NAB show in April 2020 .
Well , we all know what happened in March of 2020 — COVID and lockdowns .
So , DigitalGlue began working with specific organizations to gain valuable feedback from creatives who interact with storage on a daily basis . After two years of listening and improving , DigitalGlue officially launched its creative . space platform at NAB 2022 , where it won Product of the Year award in the Cloud Computing and Storage category . Today , creative . space storage is being used by houses of worship of all sizes , including Faith Promise Church in Knoxville , Tenn .; Lutheran Church of Hope in West Des Moines , Iowa ; Church of the Resurrection in Leawood , Kan .; and Passion City Church in Atlanta , Ga .
Why this particular platform ? Too often , we see churches “ save ” money on their video storage only to see it take an unusually large amount of wasted time to produce the content they are tasked with creating . We see churches purchase inexpensive portable drives that are passed along from person to person or using a cloud-based service — like Dropbox or OneDrive — and waiting for content to upload ( and then download ) to be able to work on it . In doing so , they have just done the opposite of saving money , since wasted time equals unproductive payroll and benefits , which are usually the largest expenses for any church . Hence , churches haven ’ t been the best stewards of some of their church ’ s critical assets : money , time , and staff productivity . Seeing the need for a solution that ’ s budget-friendly , easy to use and secure , DigitalGlue developed creative . space , the first-ever on-premise managed storage as a service . DigitalGlue ’ s creative . space is not like cloud storage where all of your data is kept in some datacenter — location unknown — leaving you with no real control . Unlike the cloud , a creative . space server lives at the location that is best for your church ' s workflow and uses your local area network with the added benefit of still being remotely accessible with the click of a button . Basically , it has all the great aspects of cloud without any of the negatives .
How to save your video team an hour a day But to say the solution is “ just storage ” is like saying your iPhone or Android is “ just a phone .” Yes , creative . space is both an operating and file system on a network-attached storage server , but it ’ s also a very powerful platform designed specifically for creatives with software so intuitive that an IT team isn ’ t required to manage it . DigitalGlue ’ s creative . space empowers production teams by providing an efficient , stress-free workflow that saves users at least an hour a day ( including IT staff ). Multiple creative . space customers have even made the comment that they were saving so much money previously spent on wasted time , it felt like they were getting the storage for free . Unfortunately , no , it ’ s not actually free — but it is a fraction of the cost of storing your data in the cloud . Take , for instance , the entry-level // ROGUE PRO with around 60TB of usable storage compared to Amazon Web Services ( AWS ). Over a threeyear period , the total cost of ownership for AWS is close to $ 80,000 ($ 26,667 a year ) whereas the // ROGUE PRO only costs $ 23,365 ($ 7,788 a year ). Not to mention that the AWS price above doesn ’ t include the “ break-up fee ” — the $ 100 or so price per TB it charges to get your content off of their servers . If your church has gone through the process of purchasing and setting up shared storage , you know it is not a set-it-and-forget-it experience . They can cost anywhere from tens of thousands to well beyond $ 100,000 with mandatory annual service agreements that are 10 % to 15 % of the purchase price and provide the bare minimum customer support . DigitalGlue refers to this as reactive support because the call is made after the system breaks , which usually means the system will be down for hours , if not days or weeks . You remember that $ 7,788 a year price for the // ROGUE PRO above ? It includes an on-site spare hard drive and power supply , along with 24 / 7 proactive monitoring and support . Advanced monitoring tracks more than 3,000 metrics per second , alerting the DigitalGlue team when the system shows signs that it might be failing soon . Examples include a single bad sector on a hard drive ( a drive can lose dozens of sectors before it ever goes bad ) or the CPU getting unexpectedly warm off-hours because the air-conditioning system has failed and the data room is going thermal . ( True story : our proactive service saved a customer from having their equipment literally melt .) This proactive monitoring has been compared to “ having an IT department inside the box .”
Keeping stewardship front-and-center Church leaders strive , always , to be good stewards of the assets which God has entrusted to them . To this end , it ’ s worth reiterating that creative . space helps production teams practice the best possible stewardship of their time and the church ’ s financial resources — and in turn , they ’ re able to better serve their congregations by producing more content than ever before . So , if your church has a production team ( even if it ’ s only a few people ), it pays to schedule a demo at
www . creative . space and see firsthand how creative . space will save each person on the team at least an hour a day . That hour translates to greater productivity in generating inspiring video content that drives your ministries ' outreach , volunteerism , weekly giving , donations , and so much more .
22 CHURCH EXECUTIVE | NOV / DEC 2022