Amnesty International has migrated its web hosting to a private cloud-based infrastructure, provided by Claranet, to support the flexibility it requires as it grows its websites and engages in social media activities.
A private cloud offers Amnesty International a flexible approach to scaling its website, which enables it to support campaigns run over social media sites. A hosted services approach would not have been flexible enough to support scaling bandwidth and servers up and down to support peak traffic during a social media campaign. The use of a private, over a public cloud is also significant, given that Amnesty International campaigns on human rights issues that some global organisations and governments would prefer to cover up. The attacks on Wikileaks earlier this year - and the fact that some of its service providers switched off the site - illustrates one of the inherent problems of public cloud services.
Initially we undertook a business case exercise, looking at the risks, and how our websites are hosted... Claranet's SLA covered the whole service and guaranteed application availability. We wanted to dramatically streamline our hosting platform and it was clear that Claranet's all-encompassing SLA and single point-of-contact would help us to do this.
Kamesh Patel, Head of IT, Amnesty International UK
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Article: Amnesty moves to private cloud with Claranet for web 2.0 flexibility
Source: Computer Weekly