Six Benefits of Moving Your Charity to the Cloud

Jenny Tomlinson of m-hance takes us through how moving to the cloud could benefit your charity

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Cloud technology is fast becoming a mainstream staple for not only modern businesses but also many charitable organisations who want to keep up to date. As technology advances, the number of benefits that moving to the cloud can bring to your organisation over keeping your systems on-site, will only continue to increase, making them difficult to ignore.

On-premises applications may still be considered as a perfectly viable option for many charities. Others may be experiencing challenges with, or may have outgrown, their on-premises systems. These challenges may include access issues for your employees or volunteers due to a dated IT infrastructure, performance issues, poor or non-existent integrations with other internal systems, lack of scalability and so on.

Cloud technology can help charities in many ways. In this article, we’ll talk about 6 ways in which the cloud can benefit your charity, in order to help you decide whether migrating your charity applications is the right move.

1. Secure data

Many charities worry that using cloud storage means that their data is not secure. If your volunteers are always on the move, data is often shared and accessed on different devices across many different locations, which is a huge risk when it comes to data security.

Microsoft, for example, spends $1bn a year on cybersecurity to ensure that data stays safe in the cloud and, as a result, has blocked 5 billion malware threats. It also ensures that the way in which data is stored is compliant with the wealth of different regulations around the world, covering more than 70 global regulations including GDPR. Microsoft’s network of global data centres has an infrastructure which is designed to bring applications closer to users; preserving data residency and offering comprehensive compliance and resiliency options for customers. These interconnected data centres provide data security and encryption to charities who can rest safe in the knowledge that they are using the same data security solution as large organisations such as the UK Government. It’s important that trust in your charity is upheld and securely storing the data of your supporters is key to this.

2. Easier maintenance and regular updates

Cloud-based systems are easier to maintain and keep up-to-date when compared to on-premises solutions. For smaller charities, it is unlikely you will have a team of IT professionals dedicated to updating and maintaining your computers and servers. Therefore, with the cloud, any updates and improvements generated by providers such as Microsoft, are pushed through automatically as part of the service. Microsoft push major updates every 6 months and can include everything from emerging security threats to new features, helping applications to say fresh. There’s no need to install a range of software on individual computers; employees and volunteers can instead access the system on any device, at anytime and anywhere.

3. Reduce costs

Moving to cloud applications or storage can help maximise space and significantly cut energy expenditures by removing the need for power-hungry physical servers at your premises. Good news for the annual electricity bill!

4. Business continuity and disaster recovery

Another great benefit of using cloud technology is business continuity and recovery during a disruption. If a disruption prevents charities from meeting supporter needs or brings them out of compliance with certain regulations, the impact on the charity can be significant and far-reaching. Cloud technology erases this risk.

Microsoft has solutions in place to safeguard data and applications. These solutions include Microsoft Azure Site Recovery (ASR) and Microsoft Azure Backup which allow charities to recover from disruptions in minutes, with minimal data loss. With cloud technology, your employees can also keep working from anywhere, minimising the effect on productivity.

5. Integration

There are a range of different applications that charities use for the day-to-day running of their organisation. Solutions like Microsoft Dynamics work seamlessly with other Microsoft products such as Outlook, Word, and Excel as well as tools like Power BI. But Microsoft wants to ensure it can meet wider requirements so for this reason it expands beyond only supporting its own software. It also supports many programming languages, tools, databases, frameworks, devices, and operating systems, all helping organisations to streamline their activities.

6. Cloud services

Microsoft is the only cloud service to offer solutions for all three cloud computing categories, which include infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). IaaS delivers computer infrastructure such as hardware, storage, servers, and data. SaaS is where a third-party provider hosts the application and makes it available to supporters over the internet. PaaS provides a platform that allows supporters to develop, run, and manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the typically associated infrastructure. So there are lots of options to consider to find the one that is the best fit for your charity.

It’s no secret that cloud-based applications can offer plenty of benefits to charities. If your organisation is ready to migrate its supporter management or finance solutions to the cloud, feel free to visit our website www.nfp365.com