NOZ/mh:n MEDIEN - Transforming regional journalism with cloud-based collaboration and insights
German publisher NOZ/mh:n MEDIEN migrated its workforce to Google Workspace and its legacy data centers to Google Cloud, accelerating collaboration, security, and better reader experiences.
NOZ/mh:n MEDIEN
NOZ/mh:n MEDIEN is an agile group of companies with over 3000 employees in 43 companies at 68 locations in Germany. The group traditionally produces daily newspapers and weeklies in the core markets of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein. Journalistic digital formats, various services, real estate projects, logistics, ecommerce and consulting complement the business.
The Challenge
With this focus in mind, NOZ/mh:n MEDIEN embarked on a significant digital transformation in 2020 to accelerate efficiency across its organization and elevate its offering to readers. First, it unified its collaboration tools with Google Workspace.
Then, a DDoS attack hit in 2022, flooding NOZ/mh:n MEDIEN’s public IP address ranges, blocking legitimate user requests, and resulting in loss of access to internal services for all employees. Realizing it needed to become more attack-proof, NOZ/mh:n MEDIEN began migrating its public-facing data center to Google Cloud.
The solution
Following its Google Workspace migration and the cyberattack, the NOZ/mh:n MEDIEN team worked with happtiq, a cloud consulting and integration partner, to begin migrating its data centers from on premises to Google Compute Engine and BigQuery. Similar to its Google Workspace rollout, the teams moved workloads in stages to mitigate implementation challenges and gradually switch off NOZ/mh:n MEDIEN’s old data centers.
The results
Solid foundations, seamless migration, and ease of integration with the existing ecosphere enable NOZ to fully leverage the Google Cloud ecosystem.
Every piece of content that the company produces is run through NOZ/mh:n MEDIEN’s data lakes for tagging and analyzing, which the team can then securely link to customer data. This provides key insights into audience behavior and preferences, allowing the company to reach its readers with more personalized, targeted content. The entire framework is protected by state-of-the-art, integrated security solutions within Google Cloud.
“If you reach the bandwidth of your server racks, you have to buy a new one to scale up your storage capacity. Sometimes you have to wait months for it to become available. With Google Cloud, you can expand infrastructure resources on the fly and scale up the whole environment, enabling a faster time to market.”