HarperCollins boosts Microsoft Azure cloud efficiency with Equinix Cloud Exchange

Publisher migrating business applications to the cloud chooses secure connection to Microsoft Azure via Equinix Cloud Exchange

HarperCollins, the global publishing company within the News Corporation Group, has improved its cloud operations with the aid of a partnership between Microsoft Azure cloud services and data centre firm Equinix.

News Corp subsidiary HarperCollins is currently midway through a three-year programme that will see three-quarters of its data centre services transferred to the cloud.

The reason, as Jay Hunter, head of infrastructure and enterprise operations at News Corp Europe, explained, is that it has proved cheaper and more efficient than traditional services.

"We have found that cloud implementations give us cost savings and, more importantly, deliver operational flexibility and resilience."

Hunter went on to discuss why the firm opted to partner with Microsoft for its cloud programme.

"We were looking for a cloud partner that met our technical requirements and with whom we had a non-competitive relationship," he said, hinting at News Corp's fractious relationship with Google, which CEO and chairman Rupert Murdoch has previously labelled a "platform for piracy".

"This led us to choose Microsoft Azure - a decision which was helped by News Corp's existing relationship with Microsoft," said Hunter, who added that Equinix offered an impressive platform for the project.

Equinix Cloud Exchange is an interconnection solution that enables direct access to multiple clouds from multiple networks around the world. Using this solution HarperCollins has been able to deploy services to the cloud while maintaining a secure private connection.

"Equinix was one of the few companies that could offer us the ExpressRoute option at the time we needed it - which is testament to the fact that Equinix is an agile, can-do company compared to some of the top-tier carriers who are slower to market," Hunter explained.

Hunter said Equinix proved to be a good fit for HarperCollins and News Corp, because: "If you're going to run enterprise systems in the cloud, then you need enterprise-grade connectivity."

He continued: "Equinix and [Azure] ExpressRoute enable us to connect in a controlled and managed way to the cloud - with a guaranteed level of security, latency, quality of service and bandwidth with the predictability of a point-to-point circuit."

HarperCollins has 850 employees in the UK. Despite Microsoft's cloud servers being based in Dublin, there is minimal latency, Hunter said.

"We find enterprise-grade web-based systems do not function properly beyond 20 to 30 ms in latency. From our London office to Azure in Dublin is about a 14ms round trip - so our aim is that employees using these types of application will not notice a performance impact."

That, Hunter explained, "allows us to focus on the business activities of our companies instead of managing networks, which can often be complicated, time-consuming and expensive."