Technology and the charity sector
Technology and the charity sector
The cloud is beneficial for all sorts of sectors, ranging from financial to technological, and now a new report has shown it has huge positives for the charity sector too.
The report, entitled 'Third sector reaches for the cloud' and produced by cloud and IT service provider Exponential-e, found that almost half – 42 per cent – of respondents had used software as a service (SaaS) based applications over the last year. There is still some way to go though, with 39 per cent reporting that they had not considered using the cloud.
Thirty per cent of respondents across the sector said they were using infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and 15 per cent confirmed that they were using platform as a service (PaaS).
Sixty-one per cent of charitable organisations reported that budget constraints were the main reason behind a lack of deployment of the cloud. Twenty-six per cent said that they lacked the necessary resources for large scale deployments of cloud-based services, whilst 23 per cent said that they could not manage the physical IT assets needed for the services to be implemented.
The report found that the cloud could help to make non-profit organisations more “agile,” with half of all respondents believing this. Thirty-eight per cent said that the cloud would help to lower their company’s total cost of ownership (TCO). A further 35 per cent said that the cloud would help to bring increased collaboration to their organisation.
Cloud Computing News reported that the research read: "It’s clear that cloud providers need to take an individual approach when collaborating with Third Sector organisations. Here, the procurement phase needs extremely careful handling.
"Unlike other industries, charities and housing associations need greater support in building a business case for the introduction of cloud technology internally, and influencing their key non-IT stakeholders."
Businesses looking to move services into the cloud, should evaluate the performance of their existing network and consider setting up a leased line or MPLS network.
