CASE STUDY
WE’VE ALSO SEEN ADDITIONAL BENEFITS IN
RECRUITMENT, WITH AN INDUSTRY-LEADING
PLATFORM THAT MAKES IT EASIER TO ATTRACT
AND RETAIN THE TALENT WE NEED TO MAKE
OUR AMBITIONS A REALITY.
Lee James, CTO, EMEA at Rackspace,
added: “To achieve such an ambitious
and important mission, the British Heart
Foundation needed to totally transform
the role technology played within the
organisation. Beyond the cloud migration
project, we’re proud to be helping the
organisation with ongoing strategic
guidance on how to use technology to
improve the overall stakeholder experience,
scale fundraising efforts, and ultimately, work
towards its promise of beating heartbreak
from heart and circulatory diseases.”
Mary O’Callaghan, Director of Technology
Engagement at the British Heart
Foundation, tells us how beneficial the
Microsoft solution has been for the
organisation and how it has contributed
towards helping the charity reach its goal.
How important is having a reliable
IT infrastructure for the British
Heart Foundation?
A reliable tech infrastructure and website
are key to achieving the organisation’s
60
INTELLIGENTCIO
ambitious goals, as set out in our new
strategy to 2030. It is the platform for our
online retail business, houses fundraising
campaigns and acts as a vital source of heart
health information for tens of thousands of
people every week.
For instance, our London to Brighton Bike
Ride is a major annual event and all of its
information and fundraising is processed
through the website.
We see a major peak in online traffic during
this time and we had issues in the past with
the website slowing down, grinding to a
halt, or even crashing, which hampers the
user experience and can hinder people from
supporting us.
In moving to Microsoft Azure with
Rackspace, we’ve established a reliable
IT estate that enables us to achieve our
ambitious goals. The website can handle
increased traffic from campaigns, provide
donors with an improved experience and
is future-proofed to grow our online
retail business.
Why did you choose to work with
Microsoft and what appealed to you
about its solution?
As part of our strategic review, we recognised
the need to transform our infrastructure
and the broader role of technology within
the organisation in order to deliver on our
strategy to 2030. Once we determined that
we needed a new infrastructure platform
to drive reliability and scalability, we
appointed Rackspace as a strategic partner.
Having selected Microsoft Azure for its
reliability and Platform-as-a-Service offering,
Rackspace was key in providing the technical
knowledge and expertise to help us tackle
the complexity of moving to the cloud and
realise value from it as quickly as possible.
What are some of the business
benefits you’ve seen since
the implementation?
The migration kicked off in October
2018 and was completed in April 2019.
Throughout the process, the website stayed
online without a minute of downtime, with
www.intelligentcio.com