Fox Networks Group, the subsidiary in charge of operations for the Fox Entertainment Group, chose cloud storage startup Nirvanix to power a big portion of its internal IT.

The media giant will use Nirvanix’s Cloud Storage Network for a couple of things, including as the underlying infrastructure for a more modernized collaboration service that is touted as more accessible, cost-efficient and secure. Fox will also use the service as an alternative for tape storage for the same reasons – mainly the first two.

“We expect that the agility and elastic flexibility of the Nirvanix cloud will enable Fox to bring its creative content and business projects to market significantly faster than with other IT architectures,” said Ben Hope, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Fox Networks Group. “By incorporating the cloud as the core of our asset sharing and distribution strategy, we can improve production performance and reduce the costs of our workflows.”

The media industry accounts for a big chunk of Nirvanix’s income. A few months ago the company reshuffled its strategy in this field by hiring a new chief strategy officer to lead the charge.  Dru Borden’s background includes serving in key executive and technical positions at CBS, NBC and other companies, a very impressive track record that evidently earned Nirvanix’s attention.

Major broadcasters and content providers are under pressure to adopt disruptive technologies such as the cloud in order to stay competitive not just operationally, but also in sales and marketing. This was the thinking behind the recent Music Data Science Hackathon, which asked teams to develop an algorithm that can identify what songs would appeal to specific demographics.

The big winner was Shanda Innovations, a Chinese data mining incubator with a big corporate sponsor that may be on to something.