Channel 4 discuss how the cloud improves collaboration

At some point within the last week you’ll have invited Channel 4 into your home, or shared a journey or two with them into work through your smartphone or tablet.

And why wouldn’t you? Countdown, Gogglebox, Father Ted, One Born Every Minute, Grand Designs, the IT Crowd, Four in a Bed, Formula 1 – even the Secret Life of the Human Pups. It’s a channel full of programming that’s diverse, hard-hitting, funny, and sometimes controversial, with everything they do feeding into their mission to become Britain’s ‘Creative Greenhouse’.

But what does it take to become one of the world’s most iconic TV brands?

In a word, according to CISO Brian Brackenborough, collaboration: “Channel 4 being the company that it is, we have to collaborate with a large number of companies throughout the world, and they vary in size. What we need to be able to do is share information safely and securely in a way that’s transparent to the end user.”

And when it comes to the biggest challenge Brian faces right now?: “The biggest challenge we have with information security at Channel 4, is finding solutions that enable the ability for the end user to be able to just come in, share the information that they need to share, whilst giving us the confidence that data is going to the right people at the right time.”

So for Brian, digital success is when tech allows the multi-award winning channel to collaborate better, but what’s the role of the cloud in delivering this? He says: “People are wanting to do things quickly, and you can process things faster in the cloud. It’s easier to update things when they’re in the cloud, and so I think your focus changes slightly – you’re not actually trying to hold on to everything like Gollum in Lord of the Rings with his precious ring, what you’re actually trying to do is ensure that everybody can gain access to that data.”

As a Dropbox Business customer, Brian recently joined us at Dropbox Open London, and that’s where we caught up with him to explore his approach to enabling his team to collaborate, and to find out his thoughts on how companies can embrace the cloud safely and securely.