The Academy Software Foundation – the motion picture industry’s premier organization for advancing open source software development across image creation, visual effects, animation, and sound technologies – today announced the formation of a new Zero Trust Working Group. The Zero Trust Working Group will develop standards and best practices for implementing zero trust solutions in media production applications.
“In the past, media creation workflows relied on perimeter security for media creation – securing the facility with firewalls and having artists work entirely inside the perimeter with minimal additional security checks,” said Jim Helman, CTO, MovieLabs. “But, as the complexity of productions has increased and workflows and assets move to the cloud, perimeter security is no longer adequate in many situations. MovieLabs instead recommends Zero Trust solutions that improve both the efficiency and security of the production.”
As today’s film and television productions have become increasingly complex and studios have adopted hybrid- or remote-friendly working solutions, legacy facility-based security systems are no longer effective. In designing and implementing today’s IT systems, a Zero Trust security protocol requires any and all users and their devices to be continuously authenticated in order to protect both data and infrastructure – whether a network is local, in the cloud, or hybrid. Under a Zero Trust framework, this means that industry professionals may face greater integration with security protocols in the course of their regular creative work – such as authentication and authorization services, or the use of monitoring software or threat detection systems.
The new Zero Trust Working Group is dedicated to determining security needs based on a Zero Trust security framework, and best practices on implementation. The Group aims to develop standards and best practices for designing and implementing Zero Trust solutions in media applications, and thereby support any Academy Software Foundation project that needs to function within a Zero Trust operating environment – an increasingly common requirement as VFX and animation workflows shift to the cloud.
“Zero Trust is a great framework for today’s film and TV productions – where vendors are often sharing assets, teams are dispersed around the world, and more and more facilities are moving to cloud-based workflows – because it allows us to work flexibly while still being secure,” said David Morin, Executive Director of the Academy Software Foundation. “This Working Group will help our industry through standardization, which will avoid duplicating efforts across all of the individual Academy Software Foundation projects, and will lower the impact on artists by reducing the number of separation authentication requests from their applications.”
Companies participating in the Zero Trust Working Group at launch include Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Autodesk, Foundry, Google, and MovieLabs.
To learn more about the Zero Trust Working Group and to contribute, visit: https://www.aswf.io/projects/.
