As A+E Global Media (formerly A+E Networks), a global media and entertainment company, expanded its footprint and digital audience, its legacy infrastructure struggled to keep pace. Manual operations, high maintenance costs, and limited scalability threatened to slow innovation and disrupt viewer experiences. A+E partnered with Virtusa to reimagine its technology foundation to meet the demands of a growing, content-hungry audience. Together, they launched a multi-year cloud transformation—migrating 39 mission-critical applications to AWS, building five new cloud-native solutions, and automating deployments.
The result: a modern, agile platform that powers faster content delivery, supports global growth, and keeps audiences engaged across every screen.
Every time a viewer presses play on a screen, a series of systems springs into action behind the scenes. Content is pulled, processed, streamed, and stabilized—all within seconds. For A+E Global Media, a global media powerhouse, delivering that experience to each of its millions of viewers means a promise of speed, quality, and reliability while proactively offering curated services.
But as its audiences grew across platforms, geographies, and devices, the media house found it increasingly harder to deliver on the promise. Systems that once served the business well were no longer agile enough to support the pace of digital growth. The company needed a foundation that could scale with its ambitions and support the evolving expectations of a global, always-on audience.
That’s when A+E turned to a trusted partner. Since 2015, Virtusa and A+E have worked side by side to drive innovation and business growth. Over the years, they’ve delivered a series of digital and cloud transformation initiatives that modernized A+E’s core systems—fueling improvements in sales, content creation, and media supply chain operations. These efforts not only enhanced performance but also delivered measurable gains in efficiency and cost savings. The common thread across all the initiatives has been a shared customer obsession—a mindset that continues to power A+E’s evolution.
The company’s transformation reflects a broader trend captured in Virtusa’s 2025 Data Mastery Report, which found that ‘customer-obsessed’ and ‘customer-clairvoyant’ organizations embracing cloud-native architectures and strong data foundations outperform their peers in agility and growth. These leaders use the cloud to unlock real-time insights, automate operations, and innovate.
A+E’s customer obsession led it to launch the Cloud City program with Virtusa. The multi-year initiative focused on modernizing infrastructure, migrating mission-critical applications to the cloud, and embedding automation and agility across operations. It became the blueprint for the media company’s evolution into a digital-first enterprise.
Once the Cloud City program was underway, A+E approached the transformation with a clear focus: validate the cloud’s potential, then scale with confidence. The team started with proof-of-concepts to test how cloud technologies would perform under real business conditions, looking closely at speed, security, and cost-effectiveness.
Over time, 39 of A+E’s most critical business applications were successfully migrated to AWS. In addition, five new cloud-native solutions were built from the ground up to support emerging needs. Virtusa also helped implement DevOps automation, enabling one-click deployments that simplified operations.
These changes weren’t just technical but had a real impact on how the business ran. Deployments became faster and more reliable. Infrastructure was hardened with high availability and disaster recovery protocols. Automated testing helped speed up migration timelines, and web application and server updates could now happen without downtime. For the most essential systems, recovery time dropped to just a few hours.
The approach A+E took mirrors practices highlighted in Virtusa’s 2025 Data Mastery Report, such as investing in cloud-native infrastructure, embedding automation, and building a strong foundation for agility and innovation. Such strategies are often adopted by organizations that lead in customer responsiveness and operational performance.
In addition to its technical capabilities, A+E chose Virtusa for its ability to act as a strategic partner. With a deep foundation in cloud engineering and a proven history of managing A+E’s business applications, Virtusa brought credibility and confidence to the table. The combination of strategic insight and execution excellence made Virtusa the natural choice to help bring the Cloud City initiative to life.
Having experienced sales growth, streamlined content creation, and improved operational workflows because of the transformation, A+E is now ready to scale its creative ambitions.
critical apps migrated to cloud
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