Oxfam has turned to Rackspace as part of a major overhaul of its IT systems.
The charity, which is famous for aiming to reduce global poverty levels, has turned to Rackspace’s Fanatical Support for Microsoft Azure as it migrates to the cloud.
Oxfam, which works in over 90 countries as part of the Oxfam International Confederation and has over 1.5 million supporters in the UK, had been running its website and some of its other applications by a private cloud, and its on premise Computer Equipment Room.
Now the charity is in the process of migrating its website and select applications to the Azure platform, and is using Rackspace expertise through Fanatical Support for Microsoft Azure to guide it.
Nick Harris, Information Systems (IS) Service Delivery Manager at Oxfam said: “The decision to migrate to a public cloud was driven by the cost effectiveness, scalability and resilience it can offer. After reviewing a number of cloud platforms, we decided that Microsoft Azure was the one that best matched these needs.
“We acknowledged early on that we required additional skills and 24x7x365 support to maintain the infrastructure, and Rackspace demonstrated that it had the capability and experience to provide this. Having this support available means that our IS Service Delivery team can spend more time working towards the charity’s key objectives, with peace of mind that our IT systems are running efficiently.”
Rackspace said that it will help to provide Oxfam with “crucial resilience” during peak times for donations, such as a humanitarian crisis and big invents it is involved with like Glastonbury Festival.
The charity will also be able to more quickly deploy customer facing features and tools, in addition to receiving ongoing architecture design, patching and monitoring and analytics reporting.
Darren Norfolk, MD of Rackspace UK said: “Migrating to the cloud has many benefits, especially for organisations like Oxfam that like to keep an eye on costs so that its fundraising efforts have the biggest possible effect.
“However, the cloud also brings challenges such as the in-depth planning needed to prepare for a migration, the complexity of architecting a public cloud solution and figuring out how it can meet the constant internal demand to reduce IT costs. We will work together with Oxfam to take on these tough tasks, offering them our expertise and support every step of the way.”
Rackspace’s Professional Services team will be migrating Oxfam’s applications and systems to Azure over the next 10 months.
