Sanoma Learning

How we helped Sanoma Learning with best-in-class digital learning solutions

As education moves more and more towards blended learning (digital and print), more than 25 million European students and teachers in primary and secondary education are using digital education tools provided and developed by Sanoma Learning. Over the course of a decade of working together, Sanoma Learning has grown into one of Europe’s leading learning companies. 

About our customer

Sanoma Learning offers advanced (multi-channel) learning solutions. Their learning products and services enable and support teachers and schools to develop the talents of every child to reach their potential. Sanoma Learning is currently active in more than 12 different European countries and has over 3.000 people working on giving teachers and schools the tools to help students reach their full potential.

The situation

Millions of users rely on Sanoma Learning’s digital platforms and solutions, whether it’s for teaching, learning, or school administration. And since these users are students and teachers, it means the vast majority of them log in and use the applications at the same time (i.e. when school starts), which in turn means having to rely on a very resilient infrastructure to handle these peaks.

The IT question

To make sure that these 25 million students and teachers always have the latest and best education tools at their disposal, Sanoma asked us to help them move to a cloud infrastructure, come up with a scalable and resilient solution to handle daily peaks in user traffic, and reduce server load and the costs that come with it. They also needed to be able to manage and keep track of resources efficiently, not just to reduce costs and free up a larger budget for further application development, but also to have the flexibility to rapidly play into new market opportunities and demands with new applications. 

The business behind the question

Sanoma Learning originally started with a classic data center infrastructure. Their services are used mostly during school hours, with low traffic in the evening, on weekends and holidays. However, the 24/7 server capacity needed to handle these daily peaks is very high, as are the subsequent costs. This resulted in a more limited budget for innovation and development, as well as the ability to deploy and run new applications. In other words, server costs became a bottleneck for growth. The company was also in need of more autonomous, flexible, and agile teams, who are able to faster manage and plan applications themselves.

Our solution

We’ve been working with Sanoma Learning for over 10 years and came up with several solutions to help them with scalability, flexibility and cost-efficiency. We’ve moved them to an AWS cloud environment and use kubernetes container orchestration to drastically improve scalability. We’re also helping by continually optimising their cloud infrastructure, to facilitate new innovations and applications. We keep the accumulated expertise and knowledge in the teams. And make sure that they take full advantage of the new opportunities that come with cloud-based working.

The mission-critical transformation

Sanoma Learning now has a resilient and continuously optimized cloud environment that easily scales up during peak hours and scales back down when schools are closed. Continuous optimization also means developers spend less time worrying about technical limitations, because we work with them to make sure their applications will run smoothly on the cloud. Over the course of a decade of working together, Sanoma Learning has grown into one of Europe’s leading learning companies.