Paul Cheesbrough, chief information officer of the Telegraph Media Group, is leaving the publication to take up a similar role at competitor News International, publisher of newspapers including the Times, the Sun and the News of the World.

Cheesbrough, who spent three years as the company’s IT chief, was notable during this tenure for his evangelism of cloud computing and software as a service.

In 2008, the TMG began moving its employees away from Microsoft’s Office suite to Google Apps, the web giants on demand desktop that includes pay-per-use document, spreadsheet and email tools.

Cheesbrough, who before joining TMG was digital media controller at the BBC, also oversaw the implementation of other cloud-based platforms such as Salesforce.com CRM, Amazon’s infrastructure-as-a-service cloud EC2 and an HR system from SuccessFactors.

According to Werner Vogels, chief technology officer at Amazon, cloud and SaaS offerings are popular among media companies because the upheaval currently underway in that industry makes it difficult to commit to fixed infrastructure.

"Some of our earlier adopters in the enterprise space were media companies, for example the Telegraph, the Guardian and Channel 4," Vogels told Information Age at the end of last year. "These companies need for being very cost effective, but being hugely flexible at the same time, because they are reinventing their business. When they release a new product, they do not know whether they will need capacity for 1,000 customers or 5 million."