Save the Children recently moved its major IT infrastructure to CenturyLink Cloud®. CenturyLink now hosts Save the Children’s intranet, award grant management system, HR system, donor website and business intelligence/data analytics platform.
“Too much of our IT team’s time was spent focusing on ‘keeping the lights on’,” says Graham Kent, Head of Global IT Service Delivery. “We wanted to move our IT infrastructure out of our own server room and into colocation – but eventually realised that we could improve efficiency and reliability even further by putting all of our systems into CenturyLink’s public cloud infrastructure.”
Previously, Save the Children’s IT infrastructure was in its own data centre and the team worried about power cuts and other issues. In the cloud environment, Kent’s team can now focus on innovation and is enjoying uninterrupted uptime, whatever the weather.
Finding a reliable cloud hosting partner met Save the Children’s strategic IT needs and its financial stewardship requirements. The organisation operates under strict financial transparency to its donors and is accountable for the funds it deploys to benefit children around the world. With over 15,000 employees, many products priced on a per-user basis were not cost effective. Shifting to a cloud-based infrastructure model proved to be the most viable option.
“I joined Save the Children to transform our IT operations, enabling us to help more children around the world,” continues Kent. “I wanted to free the IT staff from managing aging servers and legacy software packages that were expensive to maintain and difficult to scale, replacing them with a standardised, secure, scalable and reliable platform. Our programmes and systems also needed to be accessible globally, from nearly any location and not require significant investment in new hardware. CenturyLink’s platform fit the bill perfectly.”
Cloud hosting has given Save the Children a predictable cost model which provides greater efficiency compared to its previous IT systems. The organisation also gained significantly reduced latency from the CenturyLink solution compared to previous vendors. It can now operate in multiple regions while maintaining compliance with data sovereignty rules in the UK. Furthermore, with CenturyLink® Public Cloud services, Save the Children’s staff experience high levels of uptime when using services wherever they are in the world.
“We knew that Save the Children needed data security and peace of mind,” added Melanie Humphries, Regional Sales Director at CenturyLink. “Through close collaboration, we have provided them with a reliable, secure platform that is cost-efficient.”
“Our local operations teams can focus more on helping children than IT troubleshooting,” concludes Kent. “That’s what I came here to achieve and I’m delighted that CenturyLink is a part of that process.”
