NatGeo Society CTO on migrating 15 years of video data to the cloud

Data migrations are always going to be tricky but when your data archives date back to 1888, it’s likely to be harder than most.

Those are the current circumstances for Jason Southern, the Chief Technology Officer for the National Geographic Society (NatGeo), which is one of the world’s largest scientific and educational non-profits.

On top of vast historical data, NatGeo generates two petabytes of video every year for its producers and editors to use across its social and TV channels with a combined audience of hundreds of millions.

Southern tells The Stack the non-profit is building a “redundant and resilient backup” for its video archives. Migrating over a decade of video files, around 15 petabytes of data, from NatGeo's own data centres and storage drives to the cloud is a "big investment", he says.