Doing More With Less Has a Breaking Point in Post Production

In many post and VFX teams, security is something that gets postponed. Not because it isn’t important. Because there’s always something more immediate. A delivery. A system issue. An artist who needs support right now. Security can end up sitting just outside the critical path. (Until it doesn’t.)

For smaller media companies, particularly those feeling the effects of recent industry changes, this isn’t a mindset problem. It’s simply a resourcing one.

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When IT Becomes Five Jobs

IT in post has never really been one job.

In practice, it’s storage. Artist support. Cloud workflows. Software fixes. Permissions. Access. And on top of all that, keeping the network secure.

For a long time, that was manageable. Security could live in the background. Updates happened when there was time. Monitoring was something you checked in on, not something that demanded constant attention. The reality now is just different.

Modern security needs ongoing focus. Systems need patching. Traffic needs monitoring. Alerts need reviewing and acting on quickly. Threats don’t wait for quieter weeks or lighter schedules and expecting small teams to absorb all of that, on top of everything else they’re already doing, is where we start to see things break down.

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Doing More With Less Has Limits

Post production isn’t a forgiving environment and when time is tight, priorities get practical.

The thing blocking production gets fixed first. Preventative work gets pushed back. Updates wait until after delivery. Monitoring becomes reactive rather than continuous. And because nothing breaks immediately, it’s easy to assume things are fine.

But when security issues surface, they tend to surface loudly. Production slows. Deadlines tighten. Pressure concentrates on a very small number of people, very quickly. What felt like an IT concern suddenly becomes an operational one, and at that point, everyone realises security has outgrown the margins it used to live in.

The network underpins everything: storage, cloud tools, remote artists, reviews, deliveries. When it struggles, things don’t degrade gracefully. They stop.

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Where Teams Are Adjusting

The teams coping best right now aren’t necessarily the biggest ones.

They’re usually the ones that have been a bit more deliberate about what they try to handle in-house and what they don’t. In particular, there’s a growing acceptance that security doesn’t really fit neatly into someone’s list of “other responsibilities” anymore.

Rather than trying to keep everything covered themselves, more teams are choosing to offload network security and connectivity to specialists. Not to replace their own people, but simply to take some of the constant, high-effort work off their plates.

That’s where Sohonet fits in.

We work alongside post and VFX teams as a specialised networking and security partner. Managed Internet and managed firewalls are what we do day in, day out, which means monitoring, patching, and incident response happen continuously in the background.

The aim isn’t to take over or get in the way. It’s to back teams up.

Instead of spending time firefighting outages or worrying about the next ransomware alert, teams have a secure foundation they can rely on. And because it’s delivered as a service, costs stay predictable and setups can scale as projects change, helping smaller teams operate with the kind of resilience you’d normally associate with much larger facilities.

Doing more with less has always been part of post production. That isn’t changing.

But there’s a difference between being lean and carrying risk you don’t need to. For many teams, security has quietly crossed that line and adjusting how it’s handled is less about grand strategy, and more about staying focused on the work.

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