News Corp set for company-wide cloud
News Corp set for company-wide cloud
The multinational media corporation News Corp is going to rollout cloud computing services across the rest of its brands after seeing the success it delivered for News UK.
The company, owned by Rupert Murdoch, has a huge list of major holdings around the world including national newspapers, publishers and journals. News International – which runs The Sun and The Times newspapers – adopted cloud services in 2011, using multiple providers for infrastructure, platform and Software as a Service.
The project proved to be a success, with improved IT efficiency, quicker IT response time and cost savings all noted in the first two years. News Corp will now look to replicate this success across its other titles, including Harper Collins, Dow Jones and Wall Street Journal Europe, Computer Weekly reported.
According to Chris Birch, News UK’s IT director, the larger programme was only started at the end of last year but they are hoping to swiftly migrate as much of the company’s IT environment into the cloud as possible. He said: “We aim to have moved at least 75 per cent of this planned IT services on to the cloud in the next three years,”
Specifically Birch highlighted the scalability of cloud services to help the websites respond to both employees’ and readers’ demands. “Public cloud has given us huge power and the agility to meet changing business requirements in News UK,” he said.
One such example was buying the rights to highlights of English Premier League games; a cloud infrastructure opened the door to the company hosting this video footage on its site, creating a new revenue stream it otherwise could not have supported.
He explained: “In four months, we built sophisticated access control systems to manage this exclusive content – sports video clips – for our subscribers and we even built mobile apps around them.
“If we had to use our legacy infrastructure and traditional data centre for this project, it would have taken me four months to just procure the infrastructure to provide it to the apps team.”
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