UNCOVERING THE LAYERS
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?
Mary O’Callaghan, Director of
Technology Engagement at the
British Heart Foundation
and an infrastructure ready to support
its 2030 goal. Our Professional Services
team got to know the business inside
out before designing and delivering the
infrastructure, automation and migration
which was crucial to meeting the charity’s
business objectives.”
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.”
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
A reliable tech infrastructure and website
are key to achieving the organisation’s
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 Rackspace and the
British Heart Foundation taking a staged
approach across multiple teams to ensure
the transition was as smooth as possible.
The modernised platform has provided
the foundation for our 2030 strategy. In
the past, there had been concerns over
whether certain campaigns would break
the website. However, after the move to
Azure we ran a campaign on dementia
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