Jagran New Media leverages data to grow brand love and provide a seamless news experience for readers

Summary

To keep pace with the evolving technology and support a large influx of users to its website, Jagran Media Network needed to move away from an on-prem setup to the cloud. After a lift-and-shift migration to Google Cloud, with NTT as their partner, they were able to provide a seamless website experience to customers, and are now able to scale in a more cost efficient way. They improved brand love and enabled a seamless user experience on their platforms with the scalability and flexibility of Google Cloud.

The need to migrate and upgrade from an on-premises setup

The news media industry moves fast, and is changing all the time. To remain a relevant player, organizations need to be agile and nimble enough to adopt new technologies as they grow. They also need to be accessible and always available, particularly during key events. As a media organization, Jagran New Media (Jagran) creates and publishes online news and content that aim to inform and educate, with a mission to help users make better life decisions. Its digital platform has a reach of more than 101 million users and 67.18 million video views on YouTube. In order to maintain a stable and reliable platform, they needed to constantly modernize their applications so that users get the best experience when searching for important news and information.

"In a rapidly expanding market like India, we must be agile, disruptive, and innovative – all at the same time. As publishers, it’s essential to understand the core value proposition. We at Jagran New Media take pride in being a Content-First company," says Bharat Gupta, CEO of Jagran New Media.

"Whether it’s disseminating academic board results or political news updates, we are the main source of information. This is why we would often see a surge in traffic to our platforms around important events, and needed to ensure that we are able to support the load when it happens," says Ravi Kumar, Head of IT Infrastructure at Jagran New Media.

Moving to Google Cloud for agility, security and performance

Jagran completed a lift-and-shift migration, from an on-prem architecture across multiple data centers to Google Cloud, with our support. There were two reasons for the move to cloud. The first was the need to modernize infrastructure by moving away from monolithic applications and on-prem data centers, to keep up with the current technologies that provided more leeway to innovate. The second, was to address the immediate concerns that were quickly becoming less sustainable both on operational and cost perspectives.

Using our support, Jagran streamlined its multiple microservices securely on a shared virtual private cloud (VPC), saving the organization a lot of egress cost. Positive support from the Google Cloud team made the decision to move to Google Cloud easy.

Increased brand love by 300% with data from Looker Studio

Highlights:

• Improved time spent on the website from one minute to 3 minutes
• New applications released in just one day, instead of 15 days
• Autoscaling to automatically add and remove VM instances in real time to scale quickly
• Content and archives stored on Cloud Storage without provisioning or running a separate backup service
• Improved data and information security and protection
• Continuous compliance assurance

Benefits in detail:

Supporting high traffic influx seamlessly and increasing brand love by 300%

During the pandemic, the organization saw a huge traffic spike on its education platform Jagranjosh.com when the government academic board results were released. With Compute Engine that automatically adds or removes VM instances based on load, Jagranjosh was able to scale up quickly in real time to support the high traffic load, and quickly scale back down again after the peak periods.

"Not only was this a really effective and reliable way to run our platform, the pay-as-you go structure meant that we only paid for what we needed. This is a far-cry from running the website on-prem as we would have a lot of upfront costs to manage, and many times, we may not end up using everything we pay for, which results in a lot of wastage," says Kumar, adding that now, the organization can significantly reduce its capital and operating costs because it no longer needs to keep track of and implement the larger hardware and enterprise software licensing and renewal, or any hardware support fees.

The organization’s news website also saw an increase in page views by 50% month-on-month since the migration, where the average user is now spending two to three minutes on a page, from just one minute previously. Using Looker Studio the team can also understand clearly what content works well. Their product team now works closely with the editors to optimize the best-performing content for even better visibility. As a whole, by taking action on the data insights provided by Looker Studio, Jagran saw a 300% increase in brand love.

Releasing new applications quickly and efficiently for business growth

Jagran Media used to take about 15 days to release a new application, which included working with the vendor, completing the documentation required, and setting up the infrastructure for deployment. Now, releasing a new application can be done within a day.

With the previous on-prem set up, engineers would have to provision all the hardware and software and do a load balancer configuration. However, on Google Cloud, all this is done automatically on Compute Engine, regardless of the number of environments. This allows DevOps engineers to spend more time focusing on building better applications instead of doing tedious operational tasks.

With the support of Cloud Build, a serverless CI/CD platform, and Cloud Run, Jagran has been able to speed up application rollouts consistently, and enhance the organization’s overall operational efficiency. In addition, Jagran is in the midst of building a new CMS 2.0 on a headless architecture for better content collaboration across its different properties.

With Cloud Run and the Google Kubernetes Engine, the group will be able to release content faster, ensuring that audiences get the content they want seamlessly, at any time. Using our expertise and knowledge of the industry, Jagran ensures that the appropriate tools and infrastructure continue to be implemented for its growth as a company. "NTT already helped provide VPC support, and laid down the best practices that worked for our business," says Kumar. "With their expertise, I believe we are in a good place as we continue to grow."

Streamlining data storage for archiving and easy access

As a media organization, Jagran needs a large amount of storage space to host a library of content for users. Whether it’s for archiving or delivering content to users on demand, Jagran leverages Cloud Storage to manage all of its digital assets. "With Cloud Storage, we don’t have to provision or run a separate backup service like we used to when we were on-prem. Instead, we simply back up all compute and databases using persistent disk snapshots and schedule regular, automated backups with Cloud SQL," explains Kumar. Along with the storage services, Jagran is leveraging Translation AI as it continues to add new languages to its library for users in different regions. With all of its applications fully in the cloud, Kumar says the team is confident that their data is secure. Particularly with the implementation of Cloud Armor that provides built-in defenses against L3 and L4 DDoS attacks. Any vulnerability is detected early so engineers can quickly mitigate a problem quickly.

Enabling a hybrid workplace for employees

Since implementing Google Workspace, employees at Jagran are required to work and store all their documentation on Google Drive. This not only ensures that information is kept secure, but provides employees the flexibility to work remotely and have access to everything they need. Teams across the organization also use Google Meet regularly for meetings and catch-ups. Moving forward, Jagran has big plans to continue building its brand in collaboration with Google Cloud.