Inside News Limited's aggressive cloud push

Data centre consolidation is also on the cards for News Limited.

The company currently has two major centres in Sydney — one in Macquarie Telecom's Intellicentre — but it wants to slim that down to one facility within the next couple of years.

The company is continuing a drive to consolidate the number of applications it supports. 

Quinn said News currently has 48 percent of its 142 major applications hosted by third parties, but there are “still plenty to go”.

The number of applications in News' environment has slimmed down from 1500 several years ago, and Quinn wants to cut it even further to around 42. 

“We’ll eliminate some, some are duplicates that we can get rid of and we’ll move what we can. There’ll still be little PC apps about, but it’s the systems that are big enough to worry about that we’re looking at.”

Creating an innovative internal culture

News currently has an IT headcount of around 500 full time staff and 300 contractors  - down by around 150 in recent years due to pressure on the media industry.

Quinn doesn’t anticipate more departures but said long tenure workers in particular will need to adapt to the planned new environment.

“Part of the problem with long tenure is the capacity to change,” he said. “We’ve got to teach the IT team to be nimble and fast, or get people who are.

“We’ll put people in different spots, and over time numbers might fall but it’ll be two years before we start to see that.

"Certainly the model is changing and people need to be aware of that. We’re all adults and we need to know things are changing."