Thriving in the journalism industry has become increasingly challenging in recent years with the explosion in online information sources. Satisfying today’s information-hungry audiences means keeping digital platforms constantly up to date while continuing to serve the print market as efficiently as possible.

Reach is the largest newspaper publisher in the United Kingdom, with its well-known Daily Mirror just one of more than 70 websites and 150 print titles. Over the past several years, it has moved its web platform to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud to increase scalability, reduce costs, and ensure that customers can always access the news they need. For example, the 2016 U.S. presidential election required the company to scale up its infrastructure tenfold in a matter of minutes—something Reach plc was able to able to handle easily using AWS.

Ensuring Availability in a Hybrid World

Some of the company’s print titles are published multiple times a day, and to maximize press productivity, it performs extensive contract printing work for other companies. All these activities are highly time-sensitive. “If IT services go down, it could cause missed deadlines or, worse still, failure to publish an edition—something that has never happened in the company’s history,” says Peter Raettig, head of technical operations at Reach. “Such an event could drive away readers and the advertisers who seek them.”

While its digital experiences all run on AWS, the company uses a hybrid approach to IT overall. Its ad-management, analytics, editorial, and printing applications are hosted in an on-premises data center. It partnered with NetApp to gain the scalable storage capabilities it required to consolidate all these functions into a single location, achieving significant cost savings through technologies such as deduplication and snapshots.

This approach is cost-efficient, but it makes disaster recovery (DR) a business-critical function for Reach. The company needs to know that if its data center goes down, photographers, writers, editors, and printing professionals can still get to the tools they need to keep the business going.

Previously, the company replicated services and data in a DR facility hosted in its London headquarters—a pricey proposition, given that it is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. When the lease was up on the DR floor, Raettig saw another opportunity to take advantage of the AWS Cloud. “In addition to eliminating an entire floor’s worth of costly space, moving DR to AWS enabled us to further reduce our infrastructure spend,” he says.