Designing a Resilient Cloud-Native Framework for Secure and Scalable News Media Platforms

Abstract

Online news platforms in Cambodia have become a primary channel for public information, yet many still run on monolithic, single-server deployments of WordPress or custom PHP applications. News platforms face a distinctive load and threat profile: unpredictable breaking-news traffic surges, sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) campaigns against journalism organizations, and a documented history of compromise and defacement of Cambodian outlets. This paper proposes the Resilient News Media Framework (RNMF), a cloud-native hosting and delivery framework that provides a resilient substrate on which a newsroom’s content management system (CMS) operates in a decoupled (headless) mode. RNMF combines edge protection (CDN/WAF), load balancing, separation of the public reader plane from the editorial plane, publish-aware caching, a replicated PostgreSQL data tier, observability, and zero-trust administrative access. Following a Design Science Research (DSR) methodology, we (i) establish the problem with evidence on threats and on the platforms used by Cambodian outlets, (ii) map news-specific requirements to architectural mechanisms, (iii) analyze development, operational, ecosystem, and time-to-market costs together with a phased adoption path, and (iv) report qualitative operational validation from a production deployment. Benchmark figures are withheld for infrastructure confidentiality; we discuss this limitation and outline a quantitative evaluation agenda.