Future-forward learning and media company

Call for change

Making a bold shift to the cloud

Sanoma’s roots date back to 1889, when Päivälehti, a Helsinki-based daily paper was founded. Today, Sanoma is the leading European provider of learning solutions in print and digital format in the K-12 segment and the leading consumer media company in Finland.

Sanoma is a frontrunner in transforming its systems and processes to maximize the benefits of digitalization. In order to make their future-forward vision a reality, Sanoma worked closely with Accenture to further transform their IT environment with cloud.

When tech meets human ingenuity

It’s all about co-creation

Building on this successful relationship, Sanoma and Accenture have collaborated to design and implement a cloud-first strategy utilizing the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform migrating Sanoma’s enterprise systems and tools to the cloud.

The two organizations worked as a unified team in every step of the cloud journey—from the design and development of the infrastructure solutions, business case and execution plans to the AWS implementation to the ongoing maintenance of the cloud infrastructure. That teamwork carried through to other critical enterprise IT improvements.

The projects complied renewing Sanoma’s network environment with new technologies and devices, strengthening the local and backbone network, and importantly, also migrating all user workstations (4,000+) to Windows 10 and all user files to Microsoft’s OneDrive file-hosting service. Additionally, the team implemented Office365, moved from on-premise Microsoft SharePoint to SharePoint Online. The Azure Active Directory enterprise identity service enabled single sign-on and multi-factor authentication to protect Sanoma’s new workplace from cybersecurity attacks.

To help ensure the success of the multitower IT transformation, Sanoma and Accenture provided training and coaching to assist the workforce in its transition to the new cloud-based IT and workplace models. And to ensure that employees would continue to get the most from the new IT capabilities, the team set up a new global help desk with a host of self-help tools and live support in Finnish, Dutch and English.

A valuable difference

What 99+% in the cloud means

With its cloud-first strategy and successful AWS and Azure deployments, Sanoma has moved 99% of its infrastructure and applications to the cloud. Sanoma’s mission to educate and deliver learning, independent media and entertainment is now all the more actionable.

With its new cloud-enabled IT environment up and running, the benefits to Sanoma are meeting and exceeding the company’s goals for improved transparency, resiliency, and agility. The company can, for example, now integrate acquisitions and manage the separation of divestments significantly faster and with less effort than before the cloud journey. What was a complex, costly and risky IT environment has become simple, fast and reliable.

Sanoma has a strong, secure local and backbone network

With cloud’s scalability and single sign-on and multi-factor authentication, Sanoma’s workforce can quickly access the tools, data and services they need safely.