Case Study

Crain is one of the largest privately-owned business media companies in the world. Through its 23 leading media brands, including AdAge, Crain’s, and Autoweek, the company delivers news to more than 6 million global business leaders. Crain’s journalists, industry experts, and business insiders are committed to producing stories, communities, and platforms that power the success of their audiences. The company is a multi-platform media con-glomerate that includes print publications, websites, digital newsletters, direct mail, mobile apps, research papers, and more. Generating that much content translates into steady, significant growth of files and unstructured data. Several years ago, the forward-thinking company transitioned to a new editorial system across all its brands and used the opportunity to implement its servers in Amazon Web Services (AWS). The program was a success, but Crain had another, even larger problem to deal with. “All of our file and print servers across the country were aging and constantly running out of space,” explains Kristy Caldwell, Director, IT Operations at Crain. “They couldn’t really be updated, and we were spending a lot of money and time maintain them. We needed a cloud solution.”