Case Study: Financial Times achieves 80% cost savings and near-real-time analytics with Amazon Web Services (Amazon Redshift)

Financial Times - Customer Case Study

The Financial Times, a leading global business news organization with a paid print and digital circulation of nearly 652,000, faced rapidly growing data volumes that outstripped its legacy, third‑party hosted data warehouse. Slow batch processing, high costs and frequent re‑platforming meant analysts could not explore timely questions or access near‑real‑time insights, so the FT sought a more scalable, faster solution to support editorial, marketing and advertising decisions.

FT migrated its analytics to Amazon Redshift—loading two years of clickstream data and validating results against its old system—and gained query performance improvements of about 90–98% and an 80% reduction in costs without increasing headcount. The move eliminated administrative burden, enabled near‑real‑time analysis (including a live dashboard for journalists), improved ad viewability metrics, and unlocked more sophisticated revenue and readership insights for faster, better decisions.

Financial Times

John O'Donovan

CTO