Oxfam Australia begins cloud transition

Aid agency Oxfam Australia is set to undertake a major IT infrastructure overhaul, shifting to the cloud at the same time as the global organisation considers establishing regional support centres.

The project will see Oxfam decommission one data centre, move its public web servers to AWS, and refresh infrastructure in a second data centre.

The move comes under a virtualisation contract with Thomas Duryea that will see it move to a fully hosted environment in four years time. The group will also replace its on-premise disaster recovery model with a cloud-based solution.

“At the moment all our time’s spent on keeping the lights on operations,” said Oxfam Australia technical infrastructure manager Grant Holton-Picard.

“We want to be able to free up our time to be able to spend more time actually engaging with the business rather than just being a service provider at the bottom end.”

The project is also expected to save the not-for-profit agency 20 percent in IT costs over the next four years.

Holton-Picard said a large part of the project was about consolidating geographically-dispersed data, but the organisation wasn’t quite ready to make the move to a fully hosted environment.

It will now look at moving key enterprise applications to a software-as-a-service model as part of the transition required to shift to a fully hosted model.

Oxfam Australia is one of around 17 independent Oxfam organsiations around the world, with 350 staff in the local market.

Holton-Picard said the global IT team was in the early stages of exploring regional support centres, based on time zones across the globe.

“At the moment our team is just looking after Oxfam Australia, but if we start looking at regional support models then we open up the opportunity to provide regional support within the Pacific region.

“For example Oxfam in New Zealand doesn’t really have an IT team of its own, so we’re looking at the opportunity for Oxfam Australia to be able to provide the service in the region to help out those smaller Oxfams.”