Industry Insights: Balancing access and security in distributed production

As broadcast operations become more distributed, security controls must evolve without disrupting live production.

In this second installment of the Industry Insights cybersecurity roundtable, contributors examined how zero trust principles are being adapted for production and playout environments, where legacy devices, real-time constraints and complex workflows limit the use of traditional IT security models.

The discussion explores how broadcasters are balancing access and protection across remote and hybrid teams, managing vendor credentials and third-party integrations, and enforcing least-privilege access without adding friction. Participants also address the role of orchestration, centralized identity management, and security culture in making cybersecurity practical for both technical and creative teams operating under constant time pressure.

Key takeaways from this Industry Insights roundtable

• Zero trust adapts: Broadcasters are tailoring zero trust principles to verify device behavior and traffic patterns rather than relying solely on user-based authentication.
• Access without friction: Least-privilege access and continuous verification helped secure remote teams without slowing live production workflows.
• Vendor risk persists: Third-party access, credentials and integrations remained a frequent source of exposure requiring tighter controls and monitoring.
• Orchestration matters: Centralized orchestration and allow-list approaches improved control over who and what could access production systems.
• Culture is critical: Effective cybersecurity depended as much on awareness and shared responsibility as on technical controls.

What role does zero trust architecture play in securing production and playout systems?

Jamie Horner, SVP, corporate strategy, Providius: Zero trust plays a role in production and playout systems, but it must be adapted to environments where many devices can’t support modern authentication or endpoint controls. Instead of user identity, the focus becomes continuous verification of device behavior, configuration, and traffic patterns to ensure equipment is operating as expected. This approach delivers zero trust outcomes without disrupting the real-time, timing-sensitive workflows these systems depend on.

Max Eisendrath, CEO and founder, Redflag AI: A zero trust model ensures that every encoder, user, and process must authenticate before content leaves the origin. By integrating session-level fingerprinting, Redflag enforces identity verification at the pixel and packet level.

Sergio Ammirata, Ph.D., founder and chief scientist, SipRadius: Zero trust finally reflects the reality that a media workflow is only as strong as the single device nobody checked. In a distributed environment where creation, control, and contribution happen in different places, assuming internal safety is a fast path to disaster. Zero trust forces the discipline of validating every node, every time, which is the only sensible approach when even a misplaced encoder can expose an entire network map.

Jan Helgesen, head of product and solutions, Nevion: Zero trust architectures operate on the principle of “never trust, always verify,” meaning that no user, device, or service, whether inside or outside the network, is trusted by default.
Orchestration can play in important role here: whereas most intelligent routed networks work on the basis of a deny-list (which tries to, but cannot fully, exclude undesirable access), SDN (controlled by an orchestration system such as Nevion VideoIPath) uses “allow list” (meaning any access that has not explicitly been granted will be denied).

How can broadcasters balance accessibility and security across remote and distributed teams?

Jamie Horner, SVP, corporate strategy, Providius: Remote workflows introduce more entry points, so access must be controlled without adding friction that slows production. The key is enforcing least-privilege access while continuously verifying device and network behavior to catch anomalies that credential checks miss. This lets distributed teams work efficiently while maintaining operational assurance across all connected locations.

Advertisement

Crystal Pham, VP, operations and program management, TPN: Balancing access and security starts with designing workflows that reflect how remote teams actually collaborate by implementing strong identity controls, multi-factor authentication, and well-defined permissions support secure access, while secure cloud platforms ensure teams can work from anywhere without exposing sensitive content. To reduce risk, organizations layer in device-level protections, real-time monitoring, and targeted user training focused on high-risk behaviors. Organizations can also start to adopt zero-trust architecture, which verifies every user and device whether inside or outside the organization’s perimeter.

Simon Parkinson, managing director, Dot Group: The balance lies in granular access controls combined with real-time monitoring rather than blanket restrictions. Define security policies centrally but apply them dynamically based on user behavior, data sensitivity and access context. Modern solutions enable broadcasters to monitor privileged user activity whilst automatically masking or redacting sensitive information when suspicious patterns emerge — maintaining collaboration speed without compromising content security.

Ned Pyle, enterprise storage technical officer, Tuxera: The answer is removing the false choice between the two. SMB over QUIC provides VPN-like security without VPN complexity — TLS 1.3 encryption protects the entire file sharing conversation from end to end, even safeguarding legacy authentication methods during the handshake. Because QUIC operates on UDP/443 and works seamlessly across Windows without new client software or training, remote teams get secure access to production storage whether they’re on-premise, in the cloud, or connecting from home studios. Third-party clients such as Visuality Systems extend this capability to Linux and Android platforms, broadening accessibility across diverse production environments.

Stephan Würmlin Stadler, VP, product, Appear: Remote and distributed production has become standard, but it only works when access is carefully managed without compromising the real-time nature of live media. Centralized policy management and media-aware traffic handling ensure that teams can collaborate seamlessly while maintaining protection against unauthorized access, latency spikes or accidental misrouting. This is making it possible to extend access globally without sacrificing security or signal integrity.

Sergio Ammirata, Ph.D., founder and chief scientist, SipRadius: Remote production depends on instant access to signals, comms, and files, but giving everyone access through consumer tools creates long-term exposure that is easy to forget about. The safest approach is to keep media, talkback, and operational data inside the same encrypted transport path rather than spreading activity across platforms that store logs and metadata elsewhere. When teams all work inside a single security boundary, accessibility becomes simple and the attack surface becomes much smaller.

Jan Helgesen, head of product and solutions, Nevion: Centralized authentication and authorization of users is key to balancing accessibility and security in such a distributed environment. Single sign-on (SSO) using corporate accounts (e.g., SAML) make onboarding and offboarding easier and more secure. Multi-tenant support and fine-grained security controls allow organizations to manage access efficiently across multiple teams and locations, and based on specific tasks.

What are the best practices for managing vendor access, credentials and third-party integrations?

Jamie Horner, SVP, corporate strategy, Providius: Vendor access in broadcast environments often bypasses traditional IT controls, so the priority is limiting privileges and verifying device behavior rather than assuming external tools are trustworthy. Credentials and API permissions should be scoped to the minimum required, and third-party system interactions with production devices should be continuously monitored. The most effective approach treats every integration as a potential attack pathway and validates both configuration changes and network activity in real time.

Crystal Pham, VP, operations and program management, TPN: Organizations should manage vendor access by enforcing least-privilege permissions, multi-factor authentication, and continuous monitoring of third-party activity. They should complete regular third-party risk assessments using a standardized industry program such as TPN and the MPA Best Practices, segment and control separation between vendor and core systems, and regularly review or manage access when it’s no longer needed.

Simon Parkinson, managing director, Dot Group: Establish tamper-proof audit trails that track configuration changes and access events across all vendor touchpoints. Implement automated workflows that flag unusual access patterns or privilege escalations in real time. The goal is reducing dwell time when threats emerge, whether from compromised credentials or insider risks, through AI-powered behavioral analysis that distinguishes genuine threats from operational noise.

Ned Pyle, enterprise storage technical officer, Tuxera: Microsoft deprecated NTLM for good reason — its architectural flaws make credential relay attacks trivial and its cryptography weak. Kerberos offers dramatically stronger security with AES-256 encryption and doesn’t transmit password hashes on the wire, but hasn’t been practical for edge scenarios until recently. The combination of modern authentication protocols like Kerberos with IAKerb support, wrapped in QUIC’s transport-layer encryption, gives organizations defense in depth — even if one layer has a vulnerability, the others maintain protection. For third-party integrations, this means credential exchange happens inside an encrypted tunnel regardless of the underlying authentication method.

Damien Sterkers, VP, products and solutions marketing, Broadpeak: Access control for these cloud platforms have now become quite standardized, and the technology is now mature enough to be considered as secure as on-premises alternatives. Today, sensitive applications such as confidential data storage or CRM management are primarily accessed through the cloud.

What strategies are helping organizations foster a culture of cybersecurity awareness among technical and creative teams?

Steph Lone, global leader, solutions architecture, M&E, games and sports, Amazon Web Services: Cybersecurity is almost always thought of as a technical domain, but it is definitely a cultural issue. Everyone, regardless of role, needs to view security as a shared responsibility. That’s why we follow a shared responsibility model, which means that security and compliance are shared responsibilities between AWS and the customer.

Advertisement

Damien Sterkers, VP, products and solutions marketing, Broadpeak: The first step is to help teams understand that malicious activity is a real and ongoing threat, and one of the most effective methods is by giving them the tools to detect and measure. It’s common for organizations to assume they’re not being targeted simply because they are not visible. We’ve received several feedbacks from streaming service operators who discovered extensive piracy long after their service had launched.