Case Study: USA TODAY publisher Gannett achieves seven-fold data growth, faster analytics and major cost savings with Qubole

Gannett Puts Data At Its Core To Open Doors For New Business Opportunities

Gannett, the publisher of USA TODAY and one of the largest U.S. media companies, needed to consolidate siloed log-level digital data into a unified cloud data lake while migrating infrastructure to AWS. Their initial approach—running an on-premises-style cluster on always-on EC2 instances—was costly and inflexible, leaving them either paying for idle capacity or unable to handle processing spikes.

Gannett deployed Qubole, moving storage to S3 and using autoscaling EC2 compute with Intelligent Spot Management and Workload-Aware Autoscaling, completing the transition in under seven months. The change enabled rapid scale and better analytics: data grew from 100 to 700 TB in two years, clusters grew from 4 to ~25 and analyst users to ~40 while costs only doubled; analysts can query tens of millions of records in seconds, and the company now performs individual-level analysis, standardized reporting, and new data-driven marketing and predictive services.

Gannett

Oskar Austegard

Senior Director of Data Solutions