Telegraph CIO ready for an all-cloud back office

The Telegraph Media Group is embracing cloud computing in a big way.

Speaking at Salesforce.com's Cloudforce event in London this week, CIO of the Telegraph Media Group (TMG), Paul Cheesbrough, said the company is looking to move as much of its back office IT into the cloud as possible.

With around 50 per cent of TMG's back office systems now being hosted on the internet, Cheesbrough added: "We would like to get that much closer to 100 per cent so we can free up resources."

Since arriving at the Telegraph, Cheesbrough has overseen the implementation of several cloud computing projects including deployments with Amazon, Google Apps and Salesforce.com.

In July last year, TMG also moved its 1,400 employees onto Google Apps following a successful trial of the technology to access email, documents and other work-related information.

The business is now using hosted CRM from Salesforce.com to manage its subscription service and advertising sales, as well as its expanding ecommerce business.

TMG has also been using Amazon's EC2 cloud computing infrastructure to support business intelligence and analytics work carried out via Salesforce.com's Force.com platform.

The company is currently talking to financial software company Coda about running some of its payment processing on Force.com, while HR and project management applications are also likely to be hosted outside the business.

Cheesbrough said one of the benefits of moving so many applications into the cloud is that the tech team can spend more time innovating within the business.

"My internal team can really focus on doing new stuff rather than looking after the feed and water," he said.

According to Cheesbrough, the implementation of new technology is also significantly faster using the cloud model, while it can enable access to greater IT capability without increasing headcount.

"As a technology function we're under huge pressure to control our costs and to deliver more," he said.

The cloud can also help cut costs, the CIO added: TMG estimates that over the next three years it will spend a fifth of what it would have done for similar on-premises software from Microsoft.

The move into the cloud has been prompted by the way in which the Telegraph's business is changing, Cheesbrough said.

The company has experienced a five per cent annual drop in newspaper circulation which now stands at around 800,000 while there has been a 120 per cent year on year increase in online audience which is around the 28 million mark.

As a result the digital side of the business is becoming much more important and has required a significant upgrade to the company's online technology capabilities.

"Our traditional business model is really under pressure. We're really in the process of flipping the company upside down. That certainly poses challenges to the technology function internally," he said.