BMJ's multi-cloud strategy to publish online in China

When Chinese doctors were unable to reliably access its UK web services, the medical publisher had to rethink its strategy, says CDO Sharon Cooper

We are starting to hear more about multi-cloud, a best-of-breed approach to choosing public cloud services. Generally speaking, organisations pursuing this strategy are mixing and matching services from the big three - AWS, Microsoft and Google - with perhaps a smattering of offerings from other providers chucked in for good measure.

We don't hear so much about China's Alicloud in this country, but we are likely to become more familiar with that name. A subsidiary of online giant Alibaba, the Chinese equivalent of Amazon and Ebay, and with an aggressive pricing policy including offering plenty of freemium services, Alicloud now has data centres in Europe, Australia, Singapore, Japan and the US, with global ambitions to match.

For businesses expanding into China, there may be little choice but to use Alicloud. Strict regulations and restrictions on western internet services mean that using local providers is pretty much a necessity for those delivering services to customers in mainland China, as does the UK-based medical information publisher BMJ. The company found that internet access to its online publications was intermittently blocked by China's infamous 'great firewall', meaning that the service was not reliable. Initially, the firm tried to use a content delivery network based in Hong Kong to pipe its publications into hospitals on the mainland, but this strategy too fell foul of the vagaries of China's regulatory regime.

"What's interesting about China is that at certain times people can get to our online version that's hosted in the UK, at other times it's completely variable," explained chief digital officer Sharon Cooper.

The answer was to use Chinese providers and to ensure all the necessary boxes were being ticked.

"We need to adhere to all sorts of guidelines and Chinese legislation for trading and delivering online services and do that in the most cost-effective way possible to start to grow that business out," she said, adding that this means working with local partners on the ground.

BMJ partners with managed services and data centre provider Datapipe which has a presence in Shanghai. The relationship goes back a couple of years: Datapipe services were instrumental in restructuring the venerable medical publishers' operations for the digital age (see Computing's interview with Sharon Cooper from last year). The fact that the services provider has a foothold in China has eliminated a lot of the legwork.

"So we didn't need to use separate contractors, and more importantly our operations can be managed virtually from here in the UK, as part of our overall dashboard within Datapipe. That allows us to do various things with our resources we don't need to employ operational staff in China," Cooper said.

BMJ had been operating with a mix of AWS public cloud and Datapipe private cloud, but it now needed to bring Alicloud into this mix. So far, said Cooper, this has all gone very smoothly.

"From our end, our guys see it as part of an overall dashboard, so it's the same service. It took just a week to having things up and running and so far I've not heard a peep out of them, which means it's all going OK".