A&N Media adopts Office 365 and aims for bring-your-own IT strategy

A&N Media, publisher of brands such as the Daily Mail and The Metro, has adopted Microsoft's Office 365 cloud service for its email and collaboration needs.

The solution enables cloud-based access to the Microsoft Office suite, collaboration tools SharePoint and Lync, and email tool Exchange.

A&N Media CIO David Henderson said: "This deployment will enable our teams to become more productive in and out of the office."

And Mark Laws (pictured above), head of application services at A&N Media, explained that the flexibility of the service was a key driver for the deal.

Speaking exclusively to Computing, he said: "We're using cloud as a utility. It's a big change from having to build and run our own infrastructure, to just adding users and services when we need them. It's now a pay-as-you-go model."

The firm is planning to operate a flexible technology model across its entire organisation by 2015. By this date it hopes to have dispensed with its own servers and datacentres, instead renting everything it needs from the cloud.

It will also introduce a "bring your own" (BYO) model for endpoint technologies, opening the door for employees to use their personal devices to access corporate services.

Many organisations have been slow to adopt cloud services, or a BYO strategy, citing security concerns. There are fears around the loss of control of corporate data, as it leaves the corporate servers and moves into those owned by a third party, which are often shared by other users of those services.

But Laws does not believe that this should prevent the adoption of a new working model.

"I'm not concerned about security, this is a great opportunity to get away from building our own servers and use true cloud services."

Laws believes that some cloud vendors know more about security than most other enterprises, and are thus better positioned to protect corporate data than their customers.

"We're starting to see a lot of other companies putting their crown jewels in the cloud. The fact is that some cloud providers do security better than us. For example, when Amazon's cloud service gets hacked, it hits the headlines because it doesn't happen often."

When looking at enabling employees to use personal devices, many organisations consider installing virtual partitions on those devices, in effect sealing off the part of the machine used to access the corporate network.

This prevents any malicious software the user may unwittingly have downloaded to their device getting a back-door route into the corporate space.

But A&N Media is not intending to go down this route.

"If an employee is using their own smartphone to get to their mail or web services, it's no different to checking your Gmail account. The security risk is minimal. The concern is if you use it for document management, then when we'd have to put some security in to ensure any device hopping on the network is free of malware."