Client Background

• Industry: Digital-First Media Company

• Overview: A New Zealand-based digital media company owns and operates a wide range of digital and print publications. While operating as a digital-first organisation, it continues to support its legacy print business while pursuing growth through digital transformation.

The Challenge

Undertook a transformation initiative to modernise its technology stack, including identity management, customer data handling, and system integration. However, the organisation faced several interconnected issues:

• No centralised identity platform, with a mix of identity providers managing customer data across services

• Disparate integration methods across business units and vendors, creating operational complexity

• Difficulty scaling services and introducing new capabilities like personalised marketing, paywalls, and data-driven insights

Cyma’s Solution: Strategic Alignment of Cloud, Identity, and Integration

Cyma deployed a cross-functional architecture team to develop a roadmap aligned to the organisation’s business and technical goals.

Identity Management:

• Conducted journey mapping and discovery sessions to define identity needs from the customer’s perspective

• Designed a high-level architecture for identity management across platforms

• Collaborated with implementation vendors to ensure alignment to the new strategy

• Defined token issuance, authentication flows, and profile management designs across systems

Integration Strategy & Design:

• Partnered with the organisation’s Head of Architecture to implement an event-driven integration architecture

• Designed and built a proof-of-concept using Amazon MQ as the core message broker

• Introduced a centralised Integration Community of Practice (CoP) to support internal collaboration, governance, and future scalability

Results: Tangible Architecture Maturity & Platform Readiness

• Delivered a modernised integration blueprint, enabling the organisation to shift toward event-based service orchestration

• Unified fragmented identity management with a consistent, user-friendly approach

• Proved out new technologies via PoC implementations and facilitated vendor alignment

• Enabled architectural governance through the establishment of a CoP, driving future self-sufficiency

• Supported deployment across both AWS and Azure, reflecting Cyma’s cloud-agnostic strengths

Key Takeaways

• Innovation through alignment: Cyma ensured architecture decisions were both forward-thinking and business-aligned

• Built for scale: The event-driven architecture and centralised identity platform pave the way for future digital initiatives

• Hands-on + Strategic: Cyma’s combination of strategy, design, and implementation created a lasting impact