For 130 years, National Geographic has been taking worldwide audiences on exciting voyages of exploration to the farthest reaches of the earth and beyond. Today, National Geographic Partners (NGP) reaches millions of consumers each month through global television channels, magazines in 37 different languages, and the largest social media footprint of any brand, with more than 420 million followers. NGP—a joint venture between the nonprofit National Geographic Society (NGS) and 21st Century Fox—sees its mission as helping people better understand the world and their role in it.

"National Geographic is at the center of a community of bold people with insatiable curiosity,” says Nik Khilnani, the senior director of platform development for NGP. "We chase the big questions, challenge accepted beliefs, and push the boundaries. Furthering knowledge about and understanding of our world is, and always has been, the core purpose of National Geographic.”

To better support this mission, NGP is poised to migrate all its existing applications and IT operations from its on-premises data centers to the cloud. The company also has a cloud-first policy for new applications and plans to rethink traditional content management systems (CMS) as it embraces new approaches that better fit its multichannel, multiformat content.

"AWS is a key component of our technology strategy going forward," says Khilnani. "By moving to AWS, we can focus on innovation and incubating new ideas."

One new idea the company wanted to explore was providing single-portal access to the company's multimedia content catalog, dating all the way back to NGS's founding and the debut of National Geographic magazine in 1888.

"We have 130 years of valuable content that is relevant and useful today, but only if it's accessible and discoverable," Khilnani says. "We asked ourselves how we could take advantage of AWS to make that entire catalog available to customers."

There were two major obstacles. First, the immense volume of data was stored in CMSs on multiple continents and in different formats. Second, there was a challenge with the category of content most synonymous with the NGP brand: images—especially photographs, but also maps and charts.

"We didn't have sufficient metadata needed to surface images the way we envisioned," says Khilnani. "We considered a manual tagging project, but—in addition to being time-consuming and cost-prohibitive—we would have needed to create new tools and authoring workflows."