Oxfam Turns To Rackspace For Azure Cloud Migration

UK charity Oxfam is to undertake a major migration project after signing up for a Rackspace managed cloud in Microsoft Azure.

Up until now, Oxfam’s website – a central component of its fundraising efforts which includes its online shop – and some of its other applications have been run on a private cloud hosted in the charity’s on premise Computer Equipment Room (CER).

But this will now change as Oxfam goes about replacing its existing infrastructure with a public cloud, helped by Rackspace expertise available through Fanatical Support for Azure.

Migration project

The charity is currently in the process of migrating its website and some select applications over to the Azure platform as it looks to embrace the cost effectiveness and scalability that public cloud provides.

It will also enable the rapid deployment of customer-facing applications and features, as well as  ongoing architecture design, patching & monitoring and analytics reporting.

“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,” explained Darren Norfolk, UK MD of Rackspace.

“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.”

The Rackspace Professional Services team will work with Oxfam over the next ten months to carry out the migration, offer technical support and ensure that budgets and deadlines are met.

Nick Harris, head of information systems (IS) service delivery 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.”

Speaking to Silicon, Rackspace offered some further insights on the specific benefits Oxfam will get from moving to the cloud platform: “Azure provides the agility to run a cost-effective and highly available environment. For example, Oxfam can power down the services they do not require until needed, but also scaling up the appropriate services based on agreed trigger points.

“This enables an organisation like Oxfam to respond quickly to unforeseen website traffic without being constrained by the hosting infrastructure. The end result post migration is that Oxfam’s IT and business will be more agile.”

Quiz: What do you know about the cloud in 2016?