2024 Cloud and Security Conference — Broad Media CTO Marius Hollenbach on keeping South Africa’s top news websites running

Broad Media CTO Marius Hollenbach recently participated in a panel discussion at the 2024 MyBroadband Cloud and Security Conference.

Hollenbach is the Chief Technology Officer at Broad Media and has been with the company for nearly 12 years.

He oversees the company’s digital platforms and is responsible for the architecture and development of Broad Media’s websites, apps and backend systems.

He also heads up several important Broad Media projects, including the company’s research division.

Panel discussion

On this panel, Hollenbach discussed why Broad Media is moving its news publications onto Google Cloud.

He explained that Broad Media has historically used dedicated servers provided by South Africa’s leading data centre providers.

However, the traffic levels of its various publications have grown to the point that the arrangement no longer makes sense for either Broad Media or the hosting provider.

“We had to pay for infrastructure that we usually didn’t use, just to account for spikes in traffic when we ran stories that went viral,” said Hollenbach.

Hollenbach therefore turned to the cloud to take advantage of the unrivalled scalability it provides.

Google Cloud announced its entry into South Africa at the same time that Hollenbach began investigating which local cloud providers to use — and it ended up being Broad Media’s provider of choice.

“We found that Google made moving our publications to the cloud as easy as possible,” said Hollenbach.

Great results

Hollenbach said that the publications that have moved to the cloud have seen huge benefits so far.

One of the biggest changes was these websites’ vastly improved load times, which is a critical metric for news websites.

Faster load times affect reader happiness and are also used by search engines to decide which websites to put at the top of their results pages.

The scalability of Google Cloud has been hugely valuable, too.

Now, when traffic spikes on one of Broad Media’s publications, scaling up to handle these loads is simple and instant.

“Having been through this process, and mostly done it all ourselves, my advice to others is to make sure you plan everything properly,” advised Hollenbach.

“There are many things that can go wrong — but if you do your research and accept advice when necessary, the cloud can have transformative benefits for your business.”