Signiant Flight Deck

Advanced system-to-system automation for complex networks and workflows

With centralized control and tracking of all content deliveries, Flight Deck serves as a hub for the automated transfer of large files and data sets within your organizational ecosystem and global media supply chain. Flight Deck’s automated workflows help you move content from system to system, and can be extended to support person-initiated transfers.

Flight Deck builds on all the functionality of Signiant Manager+Agents, the proven file transfer solution that forms the core transport backbone of most major media companies. With the inclusion of Signiant Flight — for secure, accelerated content transport to and from the cloud — and the secure connection of on-premises Manager systems to the control plane of Signiant’s SDCX SaaS platform, Flight Deck offers advanced SaaS capabilities and a consolidated environment for the administration of Signiant solutions.

Flight Deck is a powerful, scalable solution for media professionals seeking sophisticated enterprise management, automation, security, and control of content delivery processes. No other content exchange solution in this class offers greater power, reliability or flexibility – or a lower TCO at scale.

Media & Entertainment Industry Applications

• International distribution of television content to broadcast, media services, OTT, mobile, EST and VOD providers
• Internal distribution of final-form television content to media operations centers
• Content movement related to collaborative creative processes, such as editing, localization, special effects, game and promo development
• Distribution of IMF packages and DCPs for theatrical releases
• Movement of data sets to and from major public cloud environments for rendering, transcoding or archiving

Big Data Applications

Many data-intensive industries outside the media and entertainment industry depend on the secure and timely delivery of large data sets. Flight Deck can be used to transfer all kinds of big data, including high-res satellite images, clinical trial data, genome sequences, code bases, architectural drawings and product design files.

Key Benefits of Flight Deck

• Scalability: Flight Deck was designed from the ground up to operate at scale. Its central database and policy-based architecture allow configured settings to be automatically propagated out to hundreds or thousands of endpoints, a huge differentiator for a large-scale deployments.
• Security: Following defense-in-depth design principles, Flight Deck offers layers of security controls. TLS ensures advanced authentication, data integrity, and data confidentiality as data is transmitted, and all transfers are appropriately authorized and tracked to provide irrefutable proof of file delivery.
• Speed: Signiant’s proprietary acceleration technology delivers fast, reliable movement of assets over IP networks. Bandwidth-efficient file transfer moves content up to 100X faster than standard Internet transmission speeds, with 95+% network efficiency.
• Storage Independence: As with all Signiant software, you choose your storage, and it’s always under your control. Agents can be individually configured to use on-premises file or object storage, or public or private cloud storage.
• Control & Visibility: The Manager interface offers administrative control of system configuration and activity, user privileges, job scheduling and automation, and customized reporting. Connecting an on-premises Manager system to Signiant’s SDCX platform provides advanced SaaS services as well as visibility into jobs and software usage via the Signiant Console interface.

Features & Capabilities

Checkpoint Restart: If a transfer is interrupted, Flight Deck automatically resumes from the point of failure — there’s no need to restart the transfer and resend files.

Resource Management: The delivery of assets between sites can be prioritized according to business needs and content delivery windows. Resource management can control job concurrency and bandwidth usage for specific locations or servers to prevent system or network overload.

Supply Chain Peering: Manager peering allows secure visibility into jobs and file transfer on other Manager and Agent systems within your organization or across organizations in your supply chain.

Automation Engine: The Manager’s Automation Engine simplifies the development of re-usable job components that automate content processing.

Cloud Backup: With Flight Deck, all Managers can be automatically backed up to the cloud, In the unlikely event of a Manager failure, the on-premises system can quickly be restored to full operations.

Long Term Storage of Reporting Data: Sending data about transferred files to the cloud means keeping all the information you want while alleviating concerns that storing an abundance of data locally would require ongoing maintenance or could overwhelm on-premises databases.

Software Usage Report: The subscription usage page, available in the Signiant Console, makes it easy to keep track of your deployment and use of Signiant software.

Cloud Storage Access with Flight: Flight Deck includes Signiant Flight, a SaaS utility that provides secure, accelerated movement of large data sets to and from major cloud vendors (Amazon, Microsoft, Google).

API Integration: A native REST API allows you to automate transfer jobs, manage users, and control storage settings. Using API integrations, you can initiate jobs from Signiant Media Shuttle, MAM/DAM systems or custom content management systems.

System Architecture

Core Components

• Manager: Signiant’s Manager software controls all system activity and orchestrates the transfer of content between Agents. The Manager interface allows designated administrators to configure the system, set user privileges, create jobs, automate tasks, and manage all current system activity and reporting.
• Agents: Agent software executes file movement, notifications and interoperability with third-party software and systems on remote servers. File movement occurs between Agents, which can be deployed as a single node or load-balanced group. Additional Agents may be deployed as relays to control access between internal and external networks.
• Control Plane: With Flight Deck, a Manager is connected to the same intelligent control plane used by Media Shuttle and Jet, allowing Manager system data to flow to a Signiant-managed cloud environment for monitoring, storage and processing. On top of the new Flight Deck functionality, this architecture lays the groundwork for a single crossproduct web interface, the Signiant Console.
• Signiant Console: The unified web interface for all Signiant SaaS users. The Signiant Console offers viewing and search of current and completed Flight Deck jobs and files transferred, plus retrieval of all information needed for quick on-premises Manager restoration.
• Flight: Signiant’s Flight service securely accelerates the movement of large data sets to and from major public cloud platforms. Flight Deck ties Flight closely to the Manager component, providing a streamlined experience and a unified commercial model.