Major Publisher Cuts Costs by Moving to the Cloud

Media and Entertainment

Challenge

A major publisher, with over 200 national and regional titles, wanted to reduce the costs associated with its growing applications estate and IT infrastructure, while improving their critical business applications and services.

Outcome

We supported the firm in achieving a 30% reduction in the number of applications. What’s more, by providing a unitary price structure, we ensure both transparency and predictability, enabling it to make business decisions on project changes and investments with better certainty on ROI outcomes.

Colleagues having a preparation and strategic planning meeting

Preparation is key

By working alongside the company and taking ownership of the complete application lifecycle, our team identified the role and contribution of all applications within the business, mapping the resilience, service needs, and cost associated with each of them.

We transitioned their support model to a central application management delivery model. This significantly enhanced user experience and enabled business efficiency through the broad adoption of enterprise-scale workflow applications, and also delivered the strategy to decommission their legacy estate and migrate them to the cloud.

A programmer working at developing programming

Performance with speed

Working with the publisher and their suppliers, we developed a strategy to transition their development, user acceptance testing (UAT), and disaster recovery environments for a suite of 14 key enterprise applications from a hosted environment to Amazon Web Services (AWS). We provided a rapid proof of concept engagement outlining the main applications that could successfully function in the cloud. Thanks to our effective pace and cost efficiency, the project’s scope was increased to include additional applications.

Furthermore, we cost-effectively took over management of the firm’s core IT functions, transferring the IT teams to a new target operating model. This ensured a unified service with 24/7 service desk, a central operations centre, and the effective implementation of defined management processors. On top of consolidating the active directory domain’s 6000+ user accounts and associated devices, we also upgraded their central data storage to higher performance solutions, migrating more than two petabytes2PB of raw data to a restructured solution.

Woman engineer on a tablet in a server room

Every cloud has a silver lining

Our partnership led to significant improvements including 93% end-user satisfaction and £2.5 million cost savings per annum.

Through our application management engagements, we supported the firm in achieving a 30% reduction in the number of applications. Our full application lifecycle capability has underpinned the 24/7 service continuity through a significant period of transformation. What’s more, by providing a unitary price structure, we ensure both transparency and predictability, enabling them to make business decisions on project changes and investments with better certainty on return on investment (ROI) outcomes.

Additionally, by moving main applications to the cloud, we aim to enable the publisher to reduce their expensive geographic dependency, speed up deployment, and enhance disaster recovery services of which they are charged for on an as-needed basis.

Through our robust and scalable business solutions, we supported the publisher in achieving enhanced service resilience, focusing on a smaller number of enterprise applications scaled according to business demand and priority.

High-level architecture blueprint

Working with the customer, each aspect of their estate was grouped into manageable workflows that could be migrated as atomic units. Each workflow dependency was determined to understand the implications of migrating a workflow and their interdependencies within the other customer environments.

Once all of the existing customer infrastructure and workflows were analysed and audited, we investigated AWS solutions based on the five pillars of the AWS Well-Architected framework.

To ensure a successful migration to AWS, the below services are part of the solution:

AWS Cost Explorer: Analyze and forecast the cost of cloud infrastructure
AWS License Manager: Enable the customer to manage the licenses used by the solution
AWS CloudFormation: Used to build the IaC templates for production and non-production environment
AWS CloudTrail: Provides full traceability related to actions that are done inside customer accounts
AWS CloudWatch: Collect metrics and logs related to cloud infrastructure and customer applications
AWS DataSync: Used to migrate the on-premises data to AWS storage
AWS Database Migration Service: Part of migration, providing support during the discovery and migration of the analytics workloads and application database
AWS Direct Connect: Provides a secure connection between customer HQ and AWS
AWS EC3 Instances: Used to run the application workloads
AWS EFS: Store the application's content and enable sharing across them
AWS FSx: Ensure a smooth migration of the file content
AWS IAM: Provides the identity and access management layer for AWS accounts used by the customer
AWS RDS: Stores the relational data of the applications
AWS Route53: Manage the traffic DNS routing across all applications that were migrated
AWS S3: Stored the binary content related to the applications
AWS Service Catalog: Enable the team to reuse and govern the existing templates across the application
AWS SNS: Enable message base communication across the applications
AWS Trusted Advisor: Ensures that AWS best practices and recommendations are followed at the cloud infrastructure layer
AWS VPC: Provides a secure network layer for each application where the solutions can be deployed

The migration to AWS had a significant positive effect on both the business and our partnership. The process of in-depth analysis on both an application-by-application and workflow-by-workflow basis had a transformative impact on the environments, homogenising OS and server builds whilst vastly improving infrastructure and inter-workflow resilience. This simplified the support and maintenance of the customer estate and allowed for new maintenance windows without affecting production.

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Major Publisher Cuts Costs by Moving to the Cloud

Challenge

Outcome

Quality doesn't have to break the bank

Preparation is key

Performance with speed

Every cloud has a silver lining

High-level architecture blueprint

Media and Entertainment

We can help you reach new heights