Founded in 1967, NOZ/mh:n MEDIEN relies on new technologies to support its employees and processes in addition to personal collaboration. It previously housed all of its internal information and documents on premises using disparate active directories across its five data centers. But as the world moved into the cloud, this left the company with siloed data, obstacles to efficiency, and limited access across users, locations, and devices. It also used many different technologies for the same use case, such as email or video conferencing, which led to redundancies, high maintenance costs, and time-consuming implementation for new users.

Internal collaboration wasn’t the only system that the publisher needed to reinvent. Its legacy data centers couldn’t keep up with the volume of data it processes every day and failed to provide the 360-degree insights the company needed to understand its audience. It also left the company exposed to cybercrime, such as the DDoS attack in 2022.

“If you reach the bandwidth of your server racks, you have to buy a new one to scale up your storage capacity,” Gersmann explains. “Sometimes you have to wait months for it to become available. With Google Cloud, you can expand infrastructure resources on the fly and scale up the whole environment, enabling a faster time to market.”

To put these high-quality data sets into action, NOZ/mh:n MEDIEN uses BigQuery to analyze the output of its digital projects across channels. Every piece of content that the company produces is run through NOZ/mh:n MEDIEN’s data lakes for tagging and analyzing, which the team can then securely link to customer data. This provides key insights into audience behavior and preferences, allowing the company to reach its readers with more personalized, targeted content. The entire framework is protected by state-of-the-art, integrated security solutions within Google Cloud.

NOZ/mh:n MEDIEN has also empowered its journalists and news desks with access to dashboards in Looker, which provide insight into the best-performing articles, high-volume times of day, and more. Gersmann says, “We can use this more granular and defined data to interact better with our customers.”

Looker dashboards enable NOZ/mh:n MEDIEN to identify and leverage trends, cultivate successful stories, and optimize resource allocation. They can then put more emphasis on that topic to meet readers’ needs. While the migration to Google Cloud is still in progress, these integrated solutions have already provided more actionable insights, better business continuity, more stability, and stronger security for NOZ/mh:n MEDIEN.

Building on its successful cloud adoption, NOZ/mh:n MEDIEN is taking its digital transformation even further. In the coming year, the company plans to migrate its core ERP system, SAP, to Google Cloud. Working with Google Cloud Partner Solid Cloud, this move will enhance operational efficiency, improve scalability, and unlock deeper insights from critical business data.

To further optimize workflows and enhance security, NOZ/mh:n MEDIEN will work with happtiq to implement Cameyo, a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solution, to provide employees with seamless and secure access to applications from any device. Complementing these efforts, the company will leverage Google Cloud's Security Command Center to bolster its cybersecurity posture with advanced threat detection, real-time monitoring, and proactive incident response.

As NOZ/mh:n MEDIEN continues its transition to the cloud, it is also exploring the role AI will play in the company’s future. Gersmann says the team is excited to experiment with Gemini to automate tasks such as writing social media captions to help its workforce become more efficient.

“We believe that AI can be a big enabler by supporting our processes and gleaning more insights from our data than is possible today,” he explains. “It’s not about replacing our workforce but empowering them to work faster and deliver better customer experiences.”

As the company gains confidence working within Google Workspace, it plans to adopt a zero-touch approach for every device to democratize access to the right tools across its network. And with Google Cloud in place, it will continue to modernize its infrastructure step by step until it becomes a cloud-only organization.

“Breaking out of legacy systems to undergo technological transformation is hard,” Gersmann says. “We’ve had strong partners who have helped us implement the right technology at the right time, helping us maintain our culture of innovation.”