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Claranet Becomes Gruner + Jahr's Cloud Hosting Partner

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Claranet is to become Hamburg-based Gruner + Jahr’s new cloud hosting partner. Gruner + Jahr is one of Europe’s largest printing and publishing houses, managing over 500 online and print media outlets. The company counts well-known German brands publications such as Stern, Brigitte, Geo and 11 Freunde among its portfolio and reaches a global audience of millions of people in more than 20 countries.

Gruner + Jahr is currently undergoing a digital transformation. When it comes to successfully steering the company through the increasingly digital world of tomorrow, the publisher sees agility, the ability to innovate, and improved efficiency as the most important metrics of success. To achieve this, Gruner + Jahr, with support from Claranet, will implement a hybrid IT model consisting of both private and public cloud elements, which will allow them to forego the need to manage their own data centre and add new agility and efficiency to its IT estate. Claranet is an experienced cloud services provider with a European footprint, making the company the perfect partner for Gruner + Jahr and for the distribution of its publications across all platforms and channels.

“Such an all-encompassing and thorough transition of an entire IT estate to the cloud is near-unprecedented in Europe. For us, Gruner + Jahr’s strategic digital transformation programme, ‘NEO’, is a clarion call for the whole European market,” comments Charles Nasser, CEO of the Claranet Group. “We are proud that Gruner + Jahr is using Claranet’s cloud services as the foundation for ‘NEO’ and look forward to carrying this challenging project through to successful completion with them. Our expertise, innovative cloud infrastructure and European footprint will all play a role in helping Gruner + Jahr achieve their objectives.”

Gruner + Jahr decided to partner with Claranet due to its track record in successfully completing similar large-scale cloud transformation projects and its expertise in Managed Hosting. Another critical factor was Claranet’s ISO-accredited facilities and services, which are fully compliant with German federal regulations and the country’s strict technical and organisational security legislative framework.

“We look forward to working with a cloud hosting partner as experienced as Claranet,” explains Pietro Tomasino, IT Director at Gruner + Jahr. “IT is an important factor in the digital transformation of our industry, and the fast-paced technological developments of recent years demand a deep-rooted change in IT across all businesses. Through the implementation of Claranet’s cloud-based infrastructure and platform services we want to take advantage of cloud’s economic benefits, whilst gaining the increased flexibility to develop our core business, as well as new digital opportunities.”