Save the Children embraces hybrid cloud

Charity organisation Save the Children has taken a novel approach to shifting to a hybrid cloud, partnering with infrastructure services firm Thomas Dureya on its path to a full cloud solution.

The charity has completely outsourced hosting of internal IT systems and backups to the new Thomas Duryea cloud, and repurposed its existing ageing hardware to be its disaster recovery infrastructure.

“Pretty much everyone else was coming in saying you’ve got to get new kit, and we couldn’t afford that,” Save the Children ICT director Glenn Einsiedel told iTnews.

Save the Children, which has the budget of a small business but a staff of 1200, asked Thomas Duryea to help the organisation repurpose some of its old gear.

In addition to relocating Save the Children’s internal IT services to a virtual data centre, Thomas Duryea will build and manage a new centralised backup system, install a new application delivery system based on Citrix XenApp, and relocate the existing 2xExchange 2010 physical servers to TD’s data centre facilities.

The simplification process has resulted in a 30 percent running cost saving, Einsiedel said, and allowed staff to focus on applications, rather than the operating system.

The need to support legacy applications meant a full move to a public cloud wasn’t an option for the organisation, Einsiedel said, but over time he expects this will change.

“As more and more cloud solutions come along we will utilise that, particularly when the vendors themselves are offering those sorts of services like Office 365.”

Thomas Duryea is preparing to expand the number of data centres it works with in Sydney and Melbourne as it seeks to lure cautious customers into the cloud with its disaster recovery as a service offering.

The company yesterday launched a suite of cloud services including infrastructure as a service, disaster recovery as a service and backup as a service, following a $2 million investment and extended partnership with VMware.

A virtual data centre with 50 virtual machines will run at $10,000 a month, and when bundled with disaster recovery will cost $14,000 a month.

Thomas Duryea chief executive officer Andrew Thomas said the mid market had been underserved with hybrid cloud offerings with many providers working under the assumption that they were more willing to move entire IT environments to the public cloud.

“We saw a gap in the market where organisations are wanting to start to leverage some of the agility cloud gives them but aren’t ready to go the whole hog and move everything out to the cloud,” Thomas said.

He said disaster recovery and backup allowed organisations to “get comfortable” with running things in a cloud.

“If we’re replicating their workloads over for DR, over that time period we can start to run IAAS proof of concepts, start to understand applications they’ll need, networking they’ll need if they do move to the cloud help them work through licensing issues.”