MANAGED SERVICES cloud
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http://dcseurope.info/n/jmyp
Infrastructure-as-a-Service stars in the fashion industry Condé Nast Digital Germany uses The
Cloud to deliver content - securely, flexibly, and inexpensively. By GoGrid.
C
ondé Nast Digital Germany GmbH was founded in the year 2000 as an affiliated company of Condé Nast Publications, and it designs, edits and promotes the online presence of
VOGUE.DE,
GQ.de,
GLAMOUR.DE,
myself.de and
STYLE.DE. When customers visit the German-language sites for Glamour, GQ, and Vogue, readers find more than just the latest articles. Condé Nast Digital Germany provides them with archived content, communities, enhanced shopping, special microsites, and more.
Lower Costs and More Control When Teske became CTO of Condé Nast Digital Germany, the organization outsourced virtually all of 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. Teske saw two pressing disadvantages with this approach: high costs and lack of control. The problem really became clear when the German edition of Vogue published an interview with a top star. Teske explains what happened: “The editors gave the article a very clever English-language title, and people all over the world wanted to read it. We had a huge surge in traffic for a few days, and our hosting provider couldn’t add capacity quickly enough. The leased servers we added were expensive too. We had to pay a one-month minimum fee for a server we needed for just a few days.”
Teske decided that Condé Nast Digital Germany needed to take control of its infrastructure and development processes - while lowering costs. He didn’t want to incur the capital expense of actually buying new servers and hiring people to manage them, and he didn’t want to reengineer the way Condé Nast Digital Germany managed and stored its content. Instead, he looked to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) as a possible solution.
Solution With the right IaaS provider, decision makers at Condé Nast Digital Germany hoped to gain an infrastructure that could run its content management system (CMS) efficiently, keep customer data secure, and provide flexible capacity management. Condé Nast Digital Germany evaluated several leading IaaS providers for their ability to
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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. Security was the biggest question mark. Many IaaS providers use entirely virtualized systems that store data on machines used by other customers. This setup didn’t meet Condé Nast Digital Germany’s high standards for data security. GoGrid offered a hybrid cloud architecture that did. 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.
“GoGrid was not just best choice for us - it was the only real choice,” says Teske. “None of the other major cloud providers or smaller local providers could give us everything we needed. In the end, the main issue was security. Germany has very tough data security laws, and GoGrid offered an architecture that let us easily employ security best practices. Our CMS was better suited to a hybrid environment, too.”
A Proven Infrastructure
Condé Nast Digital Germany got started by moving Glamour to GoGrid. The solution worked so well that the company quickly began
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