Oxfam signs up for Rackspace Managed Cloud

Oxfam is a global humanitarian, development and campaigning organisation that aims to overcome poverty. From life-saving emergency response to life-changing development projects and campaigning for lasting change, it works in over 90 countries as part of the Oxfam International Confederation to tackle poverty at its roots. It has over 1.5m supporters in the UK and last year Oxfam GB directly helped 11.6 million people worldwide.

 

For any large charity, the website is a crucial part of its fundraising efforts because it acts as a central hub for visitors to donate money and sign up for fundraising packs. It also includes the Oxfam online shop. Up until now, the website and some of the organisation’s other applications have been powered by a private cloud. The remaining applications are hosted in Oxfam’s on premise Computer Equipment Room (CER).

 

This will change following a decision to embrace the cost effectiveness and scalability that can be gained by replacing the existing infrastructure with a public cloud. The charity is in the process of migrating its website and select applications to the Azure platform, tapping into Rackspace expertise available through Fanatical Support® for Microsoft Azure to guide the switch.

 

Nick Harris, Information Systems (IS) Service Delivery Manager at Oxfam says: “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.”

 

The Rackspace offering will provide crucial resilience, especially during peak times for Oxfam donations such as a humanitarian crisis and big events it is involved with like the Glastonbury Festival. Another benefit that the charity will experience is rapid application deployment where new customer facing features and internal tools can be rolled out faster than before. The service also includes ongoing architecture design, patching & 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.”

 

The Rackspace Professional Services team will lead the migration of Oxfam’s applications and systems to Azure over the next ten months. A group of Rackspace technical experts that specialise in Microsoft Azure, transformation consultants and project managers will be on hand during this time to offer support and ensure budgets and deadlines are met.