Starting from 2010, RAI CRIT has been involved in several projects for the development of cloud-based modern media solutions. Among them, VISION Cloud was an EU FP7 funded project aimed at advancing the competitiveness of the EU economy by introducing a powerful ICT infrastructure for reliable and effective delivery of data-intensive storage services. Building on the results of VISION Cloud, and in collaboration with top level IT companies, it was defined a framework (namely Active Media Store) for implementing media workflows over the OpenStack Swift object store.  The implemented framework supports rich user-defined metadata for media objects and provides powerful search capabilities including content-centric access, i.e., the ability to find stored media objects based on their semantics and mutual relationships rather than on their position in a storage hierarchy.  Furthermore, the framework allows typical workflow functions, such as transcoding, automated metadata extraction, quality checks and other analyses to run close to the stored data. Supporting the full lifecycle of media artifacts, the framework allows digital information from diverse sources to be seamlessly and efficiently ingested, processed, classified, and used for production by team members working collaboratively at geographically distributed sites.