Delivering State of Art Technology at a Non-Profit

Providing cost effective technological innovations is key to The Salvation Army’s mission of meeting human needs without discrimination or geographic boundaries. As an international non-profit organization the ability to deliver life changing services thru technological solutions in a timely and cost effective manner is essential.

To scale rapidly and to meet this technological challenge we looked and moved to augment our private virtual environment with several public cloud services. On “paper,” we saw practically unlimited scale accessed easily and quickly in a cost competitive and effective manner. In reality leveraging this technology presented a much different and difficult story. Our first deployments were difficult and took months to move even 1 service too. We were presented with a myriad of difficulties and came up against questions that I think every organization will need to answer on their journey to a cloud solution – how do I secure my assets in the public cloud? How do I ensure the same level of security in the public cloud as I have for my on-premise infrastructure? And how do I make my public cloud systems and services manageable like systems and services in my private infrastructure. Not having the answers to these questions going in made our first deployment into a public and private cloud marriage rot with numerous challenges and lengthy deployment cycles.

Cisco Intercloud Fabric was like the silver bullet for us. It securely extends our data center resources into public clouds and puts us in the driver’s seat when it comes to control over security and compliance across this hybrid environment. It provides secure encapsulation in the form of the Secure Intercloud Fabric Shell within the public clouds, thereby guaranteeing the consistency of security policies between our on-premise and public cloud resources. For us more consistency means easier manageability.

Underlying the work our company does around the world is the need to rapidly deploy technology where and when it’s most needed. Incubating new applications and services becomes a costly endeavor when done solely in-house. Cisco Intercloud Fabric has allowed us to securely extend development and test environments amongst our public cloud providers all while ensuring the consistency of those environments when it comes to network and security policies.

As a not-for-profit organization, we need maximum leverage from every dollar that we spend on technology. Investing more in people than in technology is very important to us and Cisco Intercloud Fabric allows us to cost-effectively use technology to build cost effective services and systems to meet those human needs. Cisco Intercloud Fabric is the solution that we can use to manage workload lifecycle across heterogeneous environments. It takes care of the underlying complexity of individual clouds be it network and security policy or hypervisor compatibility with public clouds. We can continue to leverage our existing people, processes and tools and build and scale to multiple cloud providers secure and flexible hybrid clouds. An I.T. managers dream!