Save the Children working more effectively thanks to the Cloud

Save the Children is one of Australia’s largest aid and development agencies dedicated to helping children. It supports children in 125 countries around the world and has offices in 31 countries, including Australia.

Save the Children was using a range of disparate business IT systems, including communications, service desk, payroll and CRM. These systems were maintained at a physical datacentre located near its head office in Melbourne.

Save the Children’s internal ICT department consists of 11 full-time staff in its head office. The team’s core strengths are in servicing the organisation’s specific needs, such as infrastructure and service desk applications.

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Challenge

• Logicalis worked closely with Save the Children’s existing providers to migrate and update their systems – a process that could, at times, be unpredictable and frustrating due to the inherent nature of moving away from incumbent providers.
• Logicalis used their experience working with legacy applications to migrate out- of-date software to Azure without requiring lengthy upgrade projects.
• Due to the speed of the rollout, Save the Children’s in-house IT department needed to adapt quickly and lean heavily on Logicalis’s experience in this area.

Solution

• Establish an Azure presence and rapidly migrate all virtual machines from the existing datacentre.
• Optimise the various services and the way they work together.
• Provide continuous improvement and opportunities for scalability to accommodate both current and future needs of Save the Children.

Benefits

• On track to realise projected savings of 49% on data centre and infrastructure costs.
• IT team is now able to focus on its core strengths – such as help desk and CRM, and enhancing the organisation’s use of these tools rather than trying to manage systems that do not serve a productive purpose.
• License consolidation and the removal of a legacy third-party back-up solution to utilise built-in Azure capabilities.
• Moving to newer, compatible apps for improved business efficiencies.
• A single identity for staff to access multiple applications – such as Dropbox, Salesforce, and around 3000 other cloud-based apps.
• Achieve the status of Microsoft Managed Account. This means they have a dedicated Microsoft account manager to provide further support where needed.