Published: Jun 05, 2025

AAP chooses NCS to modernise how it delivers trusted news to Australians

With a commitment to providing trusted news for Australians, Australian Associated Press (AAP) has chosen to partner with NCS Australia on its digital transformation journey.

By helping AAP modernise, NCS is providing a foundation for the publisher to apply powerful data analysis and aggregation, unlocking new possibilities with AI and machine learning as it evolves its approach to delivering quality, public interest journalism for Australians.

NCS has led AAP’s successful migration from a VMWare environment to Google Cloud, delivering:

• A migration plan to provide AAP with a clear roadmap for migration 
• The design and build of a Google Cloud foundation or landing zone  
• Identification and migration of pilot workloads to test migration processes  
• A follow-up migration of remaining workloads post pilot testing phase 

NCS and AAP 

Partners for the future in trusted publishing

Watch this video to hear more about AAP’s digital transformation.

NCS, AAP and Google Cloud

Enabling digital transformation, together

NCS Australia is a strategic and trusted technology partner for Google Cloud.
 

As an independent publisher, AAP had been relying on older operating systems in a complex IT environment, and managing vast volumes of data. AAP sought to simplify and unify its mixed digital environments, reaching out to NCS to see what was possible. The publisher wanted to reduce its risk profile by better safeguarding sensitive information and improving how it manages and governs data efficiently.

AAP’s outdated operating systems and complex and diverse IT environment included a maze of multiple cloud service providers in addition to holding vast volumes of data including an extensive photo archive over 45 terabytes in size. The system’s complexity meant high-running costs and a heavy reliance on data centres. Additionally, the use of outdated Microsoft licensing systems made the migration from Windows-based applications to Google Cloud challenging, threatening the stability of the operating environment – both during business as usual but in particular, during the transition.

Data security was also a project priority for AAP for the business to achieve its long-term goals, with the security of sensitive information and its digital infrastructure critical to the success of the project and AAP’s data governance protocols.
 

NCS Australia was engaged to support AAP in undergoing a significant digital transformation, with the aim of modernising its systems. Our team planned and implemented a multi-phased migration successfully from on-premise VMware, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Oracle Cloud to Google Cloud, transforming AAP’s infrastructure that underpins how it operates.

The project involved multiple workstreams from fact-checking to photo licensing and newswire distribution. It was essential project management and delivery was completed with minimal downtime and disruption, positioning AAP well for future tech-led growth and innovation.
 

Technical details

To plan and prepare for AAP’s migration from a VMWare environment to Google Cloud, NCS conducted a series of discovery workshops using Google’s migration assessment tooling, assessing application dependencies, security requirements and migration options.

Designing a target architecture, leveraging Google Cloud’s managed services – including Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, VMWare Engine, Compute Engine and Cloud Run - NCS was able to reduce the complexity of AAP’s tech environment, achieving improved scalability and operational viability for existing and future needs. Key examples included the architecture of a more cost-effective storage solution for AAP’s extensive 45 terabyte photo archive.

The migration was implemented via a phased migration plan to minimise disruption and downtime, prioritising critical applications and ensuring a quick and seamless transition to a Google Cloud VMWare Engine (GCVE), with zero downtime.

A second phase focused on modernisation, seeing workloads from AWS reformatted and moved into Google Cloud native services with solutions including Serverless, Managed Databases, Object-based Storage. This phase helped NCS improve the resiliency and security of AAP’s tech environment, negating the need for VPNs, and achieving operational efficiencies both in terms of cost and process improvement.

More Value. Better Quality. Different. 

This IT modernisation project has enabled AAP to continue to evolve, which is vital to its continued success in Australia’s modern publishing industry.

With fresh efficiencies in how it operates, AAP can now better balance the competing pressures of having finite resource constraints with expectations from consumers. This includes improving the quality of data that informs how it fact checks information already circulating online through AAP FactCheck – a leading third-party fact checking tool it offers – plus capacity to produce high quality journalism at scale.

AAP has also significantly reduced its overall IT spend and enhanced its security posture.

Partnering with NCS and Google Cloud has unlocked a significant step forward for AAP, as it looks to retain its agility and evolve, powered by next-generation technology as it continues thriving as a trusted source of news. The migration from a VMWare environment to Google Cloud and unification of its cloud service has helped AAP achieve greater scalability, flexibility and agility to meet future demands too.

With deep expertise in innovation, artificial intelligence and digital resilience, NCS is also setting AAP up today for the day after tomorrow. AI and machine learning offer AAP opportunities to further enhance its operations, as well as provide a better experience for consumers – upholding its standards of public interest journalism while adapting to tomorrow’s media landscape.