Suddeutsche

As an internationally respected and prominent German daily newspaper, The Süddeutsche Zeitung, needed to deliver the same level of excellence to a growing community of online newsreaders. In 1995, the Süddeutsche launched its online news portal - www.sueddeutsche.de. Now, 12 years later, the site which features an all-round portfolio comprising high-quality content, receives over 7 million visits a month, making it one of the largest news portals in Germany.

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The Challenges

The challenge lay in seamlessly moving the web presentation of one of the largest news portals in Germany, to an accessible and scalable platform at the datacentre of Claranet Germany, from where it would be securely and permanently operated.

The brief for this involved careful planning, executed between Claranet's consultants and sueddeutsche.de. In addition to establishing a detailed project and migration plan, the structure of the technical platform, and corresponding operating concept, were defined by pre-agreed service levels. During the negotiation of the service level availability, performance and scalability were considered the most important parameters. Moreover, security played a major role, both with regards to the protection against attacks from the Internet, as well as the integrity and security of data, and data exchange. For example, all employees at the Süddeutsche office needed to be connected to the outsourced server infrastructure through a double secured, managed VPN.

The Solution

During a constructive dialogue and within a concept-based sophisticated "Managed Hosting Project", Claranet and the Süddeutsche IT team developed a solution which would successfully enable the smooth transfer of the existing server infrastructure to the Claranet datacentre. The main objective was to ensure the optimum performance, security and availability of all services according to the agreed service levels, at any time.

The Result

Claranet has met our expectations to our utmost satisfaction For Süddeutsche, all concept-defined steps were fully realised . The solutions suggested by the Claranet IT team, the outstanding Internet connection to the world wide web and the excellent service have already paid off.Stefan Kaps, IT project manager at sueddeutsche.de

The seamless conversion of the www.sueddeutsche.de portal to the new infrastructure was completed in June 2005. Since then, the platform has run without problems and provided the accessibility pre-arranged in the agreed service levels. Significantly, the platform easily dealt with the massive loads shortly after the bombings in London during July 2005.