Before moving to Amazon Web Services, it took ITV '21 days to make a single firewall change'

Now a complete infrastructure deployment can take just 28 minutes

ITV has slashed the the amount of time it takes its IT team to tackle technology issues, taking it from 21 days to change a single firewall to being able to complete infrastructure deployments in just 28 minutes - simply by shifting to cloud, according to technology controller for online and interactive at ITV, Paul Clark.

Speaking at the Amazon Web Services Summit in London today, Clark described how the organisation had undergone a far-reaching overhaul of its systems since he joined the company.

"When I joined ITV a few years ago I inherited an IT estate that was a monolithic applications stack," said Clark. This made it difficult for the £2.5bn-revenue company to react as quickly as it needed to. "We wanted to change that," said Clark.

He continued: "We wanted to build a new stack with a series of APIs to help us access the core data we needed [in order] to build a platform to give us the monitoring and the control of the application, and with better visibility on the infrastructure."

Automation, Clark decided, was the way forward. "We believed that would build our productivity and drive the speed of our release, and thus drive quality. And one of the things holding us back with our estate was what we called 'snowflake severs' - bits of infrastructure that looked the same, but were all slightly different. So between all these different environments we were losing lots of time trying to find out where problems were.

"For instance, it was taking us a long time - 21 days - to make a single firewall change," said Clark. "So we had to think differently about it. So we had debates internally about what to do, and decided to try AWS."

With support from a consultancy, a first iteration of scripted infrastructure was delivered in four weeks.

"We started with nothing, and deployed the whole lot," said Clark. "And then [we did a] second and third iteration, and we went down to 28 minutes to deploy our entire infrastructure from scratch."

One Amazon principle Clark is particularly impressed with is the notion of designing the infrastructure to "protect audiences from ever knowing anything had gone wrong" when inevitable errors occurred across the digital offerings of such a large TV network.

But the system was so fast and impressive, the rest of ITV was soon taking notice. Indeed, all of ITV Player is now being moved onto the AWS stack. "We're now hearing everyone throughout our core businesses asking 'How can I get that kind of agility?' and they're moving to AWS too," concluded Clark.