By Eli Weisman, Chief Experience Officer at CREE8
I have lost count of how many times I have heard someone say, “We are moving everything to the cloud.”
It sounds like progress. It sounds like transformation. But most of the time, it is not.
Too many teams treat the cloud like a storage unit for old workflows. They take what worked on-premises, upload it to someone else’s servers, and wonder why the same problems keep happening, and the promised cost savings are not there. The truth is that if you lift and shift without rethinking the process, you have only changed the address of your bottleneck.
The creative industry is evolving fast. Brands now produce more content than broadcasters. Agencies manage global campaigns that run across every platform. Production cycles that used to take months now happen in days. But the infrastructure has not kept up.
I see it every week. Teams drowning in tools. Projects delayed because assets live in too many systems. Creatives losing hours to downloads, file transfers, and IT tickets.
The goal is not to move to the cloud. It is to make the work flow better.
When I started working in cloud production, most migrations were led by IT, not creative. They took the existing setup, edit bays, render farms, storage, and replicated it in the cloud. On paper, it looked like progress. In reality, it was the same friction in a different place.
You still had the same slow file transfers, the same waiting for footage, the same confusion over versions. The setup was virtual, but the workflow was not any smarter.
I visited a large in-house brand team that had just moved to the cloud. They were proud of their new setup, but they still spent two hours every morning uploading footage. When I asked what problem the move had solved, there was silence.
Real transformation starts when you stop copying and start reimagining.
The cloud is not about storage or cost savings. It is about freedom.
Freedom to collaborate anywhere. Freedom to scale instantly. Freedom to create without worrying about cables, couriers, or compute limits.
At CREE8, we have built our platform around how creative people actually work. Our growing file technology lets editors cut footage while it is still being uploaded. Social teams can publish highlights in real time. Producers can give feedback while the live event is still happening.
It is not a copy of the old system. It is a new way to work. When technology stays invisible, creativity shines through.
The other big problem I see is tool overload. Every time a new challenge comes along, teams buy another piece of software. Another login, another subscription, another silo. Each one promises to make life easier, but few actually do.
I have worked with marketing teams that use ten or more different tools just to manage content workflows. By the time they move a project from shoot to delivery, half the time and budget are gone.
We built CREE8 to simplify that. One place for creative, production, and post. No switching apps, no re-uploading files, no fighting the system.
When you reduce friction, you can feel it instantly. Collaboration feels natural. The work moves faster, and people enjoy it again.
Studios and post houses were once designed for permanence. Fixed rooms, fixed teams, fixed costs. That worked when campaigns took months and stayed on air for a year. It does not work when your client expects new content by the end of the day.
The modern creative economy needs flexible infrastructure. You should be able to spin up a studio for a week and shut it down when you are done. Add a designer in Berlin. Bring in a colorist in Los Angeles. Let everyone work together without worrying about where the files live.
That is what the cloud is meant for. Not just scale, but agility.
AI, automation, and real-time collaboration are changing how creative work gets made. But you cannot take advantage of any of it if you are still running on outdated systems.
I have seen brands invest in amazing AI tools for asset tagging or personalization, only to find out they do not integrate with storage, review tools, or delivery systems. The result is chaos dressed up as innovation.
You cannot build the future on broken foundations.
The cloud gives you a platform to plug in anything new without rebuilding from scratch. That is how you stay ready for what is next, without losing focus on what matters now.
When teams talk about digital transformation, they usually mean technology.
But I have learned that the real transformation is cultural.
It is about helping creative people feel confident with the systems around them. It is about letting them spend their time on storytelling, not setup. It is about designing technology that disappears when it is working.
That is what we are building at CREE8, a platform that supports creativity instead of slowing it down.
Transformation is not about moving files faster.
It is about moving ideas faster.
And that is the future we are building toward.