Case study: Amedia relies on Parachute to prevent news disruption

The problem: The high cost of downtime

News organizations and media websites are all about delivering news content and live events without interruption. No one wants to find themselves in the situation of encountering a CMS issue, server downtime or other critical component failures as this usually leads to significant repercussions - the cost of downtime for the media industry is estimated at $90,000 per hour.

Bjørn Tore Øren, Senior Project Manager at Amedia Development explained the thinking behind the creation and adoption of Live Center Parachute: “We want to ensure that the news still reaches our readers in a scenario where our primary publishing and/or distribution platforms are down. We want a fallback that is fully independent of our primary platforms, while still being easily accessible to our readers and journalists.”

The solution

Ideally, Live Center Parachute would never be needed, but the 24/7 nature of digital news media and publishing is such that everyone, including Amedia, needs a fallback strategy in the event of some kind of outage.

In digital publishing many moving parts and components have to work together to work seamlessly. And in the event that one of these parts does not work, a fallback strategy provides flexibility and continued operations.

For Amedia, their web outage strategy covered a number of scenarios. For example, as Bjørn described, “Sometimes one piece of the infrastructure goes down while others are still functioning. We wanted to be able to temporarily replace the non-working parts with a working alternative while still using the functioning parts of our infrastructure. The flexibility and modularity of Live Center Parachute give us this freedom.”

Bjørn went on to detail outage scenarios the Amedia strategy planned for:

Publishing system outage: Publish to Amedia front page(s) using the Live Center Parachute solution
Online newspaper outage: Continue to use the regular Amedia publishing platform but redirect readers to the Live Center Parachute solution
Broken link between publishing platform and online newspapers: Publish as normal but display articles in a fallback window included on an otherwise static front page

The Parachute solution is on standby in case one of these scenarios comes to pass. “Each newspaper in the Amedia family has an individual fallback studio, which is continuously updated with a feed of their own latest articles,” Bjørn shared.

Conclusion

Parachute doesn't only back up feeds but also continuously fetches the introduction preview to each article published on the main page, while copying the entire 50 latest published articles. Aside from being able to serve backed-up content, Amedia is able to continue serving live content through Live Center’s CMS and keep their readers up to date with the latest news.

“In this way, we can be sure that the fallback studio is permanently ready for instant use in an emergency. The contents of this studio are invisible to the reader until an emergency mode is activated.”

While Amedia considered building an in-house fallback solution, they weighed up the options and decided that Norkon would have the expertise to create a fallback solution meeting all their needs without having to divert their own development resources to build and maintain it.

Amedia & Live Center Parachute

Amedia safeguards its extensive reach with a fallback solution to continue publishing content even in outage situations.

Background

The problem: The high cost of downtime

Conclusion

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