Every one of EidosMedia's new newsmedia customers opted for some form of cloud hosting last year, the company says.
Some are pure cloud solutions, while others use a combination of cloud-hosted components and on-premise infrastructure. Chief marketing officer Massimo Barsotti says a range of hosting options have been combinbed to create hybrid solutions optimised for geographical and logistical situations.
"Over the last decade there has been a tendency for newsmedia companies to outsource a growing portion of the responsibility for the maintenance and day-to-day management of their editorial infrastructure," he says. "We have long-standing customers whose installations are monitored and managed remotely round the clock by engineers at our headquarters, with their IT staff activities limited to routine hardware maintenance."
Cloud deployment takes this approach one step further by hosting the entire installation in a remote facility under the supervision of support engineers with EidosMedia undertaking to deliver the functionality of the platform 'as a service'.
With the use of a Swingmobile interface, no installation is needed, with users accessing the platform via a web browser or mobile app.
With cloud deployment now "one of the first things" taken into account when planning new products, Barsotti says a new framework will make its deployment even more efficient and scalable.
In addition to solutions with major providers such as AWS and Google Cloud, EidosMedia manages a private cloud based in Frankfurt, Germany.
System technology and cloud strategy advisor Giovanni Camarda says an additional benefit for online news providers is not having to provide their own capacity to meet the demands of large peak audiences. "A cloud deployment can scale up web-server capacity and resources dynamically in real time, shedding it when the traffic peak has passed," he says.