Sanoma company was first established back in 1889 as a Päivälehti, a daily paper, and has since grown into a leading European media company.
Businesses like Sanoma were in a really tough position because their IT infrastructure had always been stuck in the past. To solve this problem, Sanoma made a very wise decision and started a cloud-first strategy, moving its enterprise systems to one of the most popular cloud computing services around, Amazon Web Services.
AWS became the foundation for much of this cloud transition, while companies considering a similar setup can read more on site dedicatted.com about Dedicatted’s work with the platform.
This is about more than just data storage
The project didn’t just upgrade the infrastructure. Almost all 4,000 workstations were moved to Windows 10, employee and company files were moved to OneDrive and SharePoint, and Office 365 was introduced. Finally, Azure Active Directory was added as part of the overall security system, allowing employees to sign in easily with single sign-on and multi-factor authentication.
With Microsoft services becoming such a large part of the workplace side of the project, companies considering a similar setup can find more details here.
A huge change like this is bound to cause some confusion and friction as employees get used to the new cloud-based normal. That’s why Sanoma provided various training sessions that were there to help employees and speed up this transition. They also launched a new global help desk that provides support in three languages: Finnish, Dutch, and English.
Sanoma’s business is 99% cloud-hosted
With its AWS and Azure deployments, Sanoma has moved 99% of its infrastructure and applications to the cloud, almost completely eliminating its dependency on on-premise solutions.
One of the great things that a cloud-based working environment provides is that it allows companies to be more flexible, adaptable, and mobile, and the same could be seen at Sanoma. Things that took quite a lot of time to achieve, like integrating acquisitions or separating divested businesses, became quicker, freeing up time to be spent on other important stuff.
The old IT system was expensive and difficult to maintain. With the cloud upgrades, things became much simpler, giving Sanoma more room to keep changing its systems as the business develops.