Case Study: News Corp Australia

News Corp Australia logo

News Corp Australia is one of Australia's largest media organisations with interests in newspapers, magazines, publishing, and digital media.

Headquarters

Sydney, Australia

Industry

Media & Communications

office workers

About Newscorp Australia

News Corp Australia is the country’s leading media corporation, headquartered in Sydney. The company’s digital news sites have a monthly unique audience of 6.7 million, and as multiplatform leaders in lifestyle brands, News Corp’s online media in food, health, parenting, style, and property reaches over 7.2 million Australians, each month.

Snapshot

  • Provisioned connectivity through Megaport’s Software Defined Network (SDN) for rapid data migration to AWS.
  • Stood up Virtual Cross Connects (VXCs), individual 802.1q VLANs, to more than 40 VPCs over a single Direct Connect.
  • Addressed short-notice requirements for segmented VPC workloads requiring resilient connectivity for key thirdparty providers also hosted in AWS (e.g. MongoDB Atlas).
  • Made significant savings on time as services were immediately available in their colocation data centre

Challenge

News Corp required resilient connectivity for rapid cloud migration to a multi-VPC Hub/Spoke architecture to host business-critical content publishing, analytics, and corporate finance applications.

The company originally deployed workloads into AWS Asia-Pacific (Sydney) using a single Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) following a pilot in AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore). The connectivity to AWS was not resilient, consisting of a single Direct Connect and an internet based VPN connection. The company required their related network connectivity, from their on-premises environment into AWS, to be matured into a high-performance Direct Connect based private network. As News Corp’s primary data centre was not in the same AWS Direct Connect edge location, they required a Network Service Provider (NSP) to link to a redundant Direct Connect.

On exploring the market, News Corp found that NSPs required significant capital investment and offered inflexible models involving set bandwidth sizing and volumes. These options did not align to the on-demand and variable charging for which AWS is renowned.

Solution

News Corp provisioned connectivity through Megaport’s Software Defined Network (SDN) for rapid data migration to AWS. This network solution enabled the company to consume AWS services on demand with pay-as-you-need billing and scalable bandwidth that was dialed up and down depending on the volume of data being moved.

News Corp connected to Megaport with ease as their services were available from within the colocation facilities of News Corp’s primary data centre in Sydney. Through Megaport’s comprehensive and self-provisioning Portal, News Corp’s Network team were able to stand up Virtual Cross Connects (VXCs), individual 802.1q VLANs, to more than 40 VPCs over a single Direct Connect. Megaport provided them the ability to monitor and manage speeds for each individual VXC that was mapped to a single Direct Connect. Megaport’s flexible service has also allowed the team to address short-notice requirements for segmented VPC workloads requiring resilient connectivity for key third-party providers also hosted in AWS (e.g. MongoDB Atlas).

The below diagram is illustrative of News Corp’s general connectivity pattern per VPC.

network diagram

News Corp’s additional AWS services include: Amazon ECS Amazon, Elastic search Service, API Gateway, Auto Scaling, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS Lambda, Billing, CloudFormation, CloudFront, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, Data Pipeline, Data Transfer, Directory Service, DynamoDB, EBS, EC2, EC2, Container Registry, EFS, ElastiCache, Elastic Beanstalk, ELB, EMR, Glacier, Identity and Access Management, Kinesis, Amazon Elastic, MapReduce, and Amazon Redshift.

Benefits

As leaders in Network as a Service (NaaS), Megaport was chosen for connectivity to AWS to deliver on the promise of truly flexible, on-demand, API infrastructure as code services.

News Corp has been able to break out of the inaccurate cycle of network over/under provisioning associated with traditional consumption models. The company can now proactively deliver high-performance services that can easily scale up or down to suit their dynamic business demands. News Corp made significant savings on time as services were immediately available in their colocation data centre. In terms of cost savings, they avoided spending unnecessary capital that other providers required for connectivity.

News Corp have now scaled to more than 90 primary and redundant VXC Services across their AWS workloads with no impact to the existing Network Operations team. Megaport was easy to adopt, had a low barrier to entry for training, and does not require the team to perform any significant ongoing management.

“We have always had a progressive stance towards using public cloud for our production workloads. As our needs evolve, we believe that Megaport’s on-demand and API-driven connectivity services are tightly aligned to our own strategy to be a dynamic content provider in the emerging API economy.”

Nicholas Tan, Chief Architect – Infrastructure, Cloud, and Cyber, News Corp Australia

Future Plans

News Corp Australia continues to expand with AWS, operating additional workloads in Europe and the US. Megaport’s on-demand service continues to solve a range use cases presented to the team. A potential future use for AWS connectivity via Megaport is connecting the company’s on-premises studio facilities to a third-party’s AWS environment. They could do so via a high-speed Direct Connect for just one day before tearing the link down.