The vision
Foróige is the leading youth organisation in Ireland and has been working with young people since 1952. Every year, it helps more than 50,000 young people aged 10-18 through volunteer-led clubs and staff-led youth projects. The charity has a highly distributed organisation, with 450 staff working across close to 100 locations in every county in the Republic of Ireland, with more than 600 Foróige clubs, 150
youth projects, and various other initiatives. Foróige established an internal IT function in 2010, and
since then it almost doubled in size from 250 to 450 staff. What’s more, many of its employees now use at least two mobile devices or laptops for their work. In 2016, with its ERP system needing an upgrade, Foróige decided to move away from a model of running IT infrastructure in-house. However the ERP system was not based in the cloud and needed to run on traditional IT hardware.
Cloud strategy
“For an organisation of our size and our needs, the cloud was the way forward. We only keep IT infrastructure in house if absolutely necessary to ensure the best quality of service to our staff of the applications generally,” says Adrian O’Donnell, IT manager at Foróige.
SureSkills audited Foróige’s IT infrastructure and it discovered several challenges for the organisation. Its ERP system couldn’t run on an external Azure or Amazon data centre, so the charity needed something that to all intents and purposes presented as if it was on-premise. “We needed something with the strength, resilience, expandability and security of the cloud but from a systems point of view didn’t look like the cloud. SureSkills proposed a solution in tandem with IBM, that would transfer our applications from on-premise to cloud-based infrastructure. This was a unique offering; we didn’t see anyone else in the market offering what SureSkills and IBM did,” says Adrian.
Improved IT performance
SureSkills delivered a robust, modern, technical solution to the charity’s IT infrastructure and disaster recovery needs, while also being very cost-effective. Foróige now runs its primary IT in the cloud, with backups on site. SureSkills also helped to reduce the number of physical servers from 10 back to two. Since the new infrastructure went into production, Foróige has experienced better performance to end users, and greater reliability, stability and protection of its IT systems. This has led to fewer issues for the IT department to deal with. “This means we can focus on delivering value to the business and providing good solutions to them,” says Adrian.
The charity now has greater control of its costs than ever before, because moving to the IaaS model removes large capex spend and replaces it with a more predictable and lower ongoing monthly cost. Adrian says: “We always have financial pressures on us as a charity. We are accountable for the way the money is spent and we like to be held accountable. But value is more important to us than cost, and we also have to meet funder requirements in terms of how we hold our data and the infrastructure we provide.
Ensuring client and participants’ data, and staff information, is safe and secure is of paramount importance to us. Also, every single one of our staff has at least two mobile devices, so to provide them with good service, we saw the infrastructure as a service as a massive enabler of that. They expect their applications to work and work well on any device. Our challenge in IT is to provide good solutions
to them, to make the administrative tasks they need to do as easy as possible, and to remove the poor workflows. We need the cloud for that.”