Top Magazines Lower TCO

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing

• Business Operation

• Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

Condé Nast Digital Germany was facing high costs and lack of control over its IT operations. The infrastructure that stored and served magazine content was hosted by a traditional website hosting company. An agency handled website development and managed content. The company was reliant on advertising revenue and needed to keep its costs low while delivering an engaging experience to site visitors. The problem became clear when the German edition of Vogue published an interview with a top star. The company had a huge surge in traffic for a few days, and the hosting provider couldn’t add capacity quickly enough. The leased servers added were expensive too. The company had to pay a one-month minimum fee for a server it needed for just a few days.

Condé Nast Digital Germany GmbH was founded in the year 2000 as an affiliated company of Condé Nast Publications. It designs, edits and promotes the online presence of VOGUE.DE, GQ.de, GLAMOUR.DE, myself.de and STYLE.DE. The company relies on advertising revenue and needs to keep its costs low while delivering an engaging experience to site visitors. It provides its visitors with more than just articles, including archived content, communities, enhanced shopping, special microsites, and more. The company is continually enhancing its offering and expanding to mobile devices.

Condé Nast Digital Germany decided to take control of its infrastructure and development processes while lowering costs. It looked to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) as a possible solution. The company evaluated several leading IaaS providers for their ability to deliver on all three key needs. Each offered capacity management that Condé Nast Digital Germany believed would be acceptably flexible, but the ease of use with GoGrid stood out. GoGrid offered a hybrid architecture that met Condé Nast Digital Germany’s high standards for data security. In a hybrid architecture, cloud servers provide the cost and efficiency advantages of virtualized hardware, but dedicated machines store data and run database functions, enabling the use of security best practices. The dedicated machines could also natively run the MySQL database required by Condé Nast Digital Germany’s CMS.

• Condé Nast Digital Germany has retired more than a dozen machines in an external data center. The total cost of ownership (TCO) of the new solution is much lower. The IT team at Condé Nast Digital Germany doesn’t miss the hassle associated with its hosted solution. The GoGrid interface makes it easy to manage the infrastructure. With the time saved, the team is able to focus on new initiatives, such as delivering content to mobile devices.

• The performance is actually better than traditional hosting because the company has gone from 99.8 percent uptime to 99.9 percent uptime.