 Good morning everyone. Welcome to this Edgyserv webinar. We're just going to wait a few minutes for some more attendees to join. But I will speak with you soon. So, good morning. My name is Julian Digby. I'm a Solutions Consultant at Edgyserv and welcome to this Edgyserv webinar on the public cloud role in the digital charity of the future. So I'll just introduce myself. I'm a Solutions Consultant at Edgyserv and my role here is twofold, really. Firstly, I work with our customers to understand their routes to cloud adoption in its many forms. But I also work on the design of cloud solutions to meet customers' requirements once they're further down the line and they're actually actively adopting cloud solutions. So this morning, I want to talk you through how the public cloud can help the third sector progress towards the digital charity of the future. So our agenda this morning, just three areas really. What does the public cloud offer you? What would the steps to adoption look like? Or what could they look like? And I've got some case studies at the end to demonstrate how public cloud has helped different organisations with particular business problems that they have. So I thought it was worth asking a very fundamental question. What is cloud? Now, if you go to Wikipedia, which I do frequently, I think this definition is clearly the work of a committee. It has many words in it and it's not particularly helpful. The next definition is a bit more pithy and a bit more blunt. It has some truth to it. Probably still not that helpful. But what I think is a helpful definition is one that actually lists the potential benefits of the cloud to you, the customer. So enterprise class, secure, scalable, resilient, agile infrastructure and services with global reach and available on a pay-as-you-go model. That in a nutshell is what the public cloud provides you. But let's break this down a little bit and look at each one of these in isolation. So enterprise class. So previously, if you were a small organisation with little funding, your ICT would most likely be in the budget price bracket. Public cloud democratises enterprise class ICT to some extent and it gives all customers of any size access to state-of-the-art infrastructure without costly upfront infrastructure. In terms of security, the public cloud is secure. It's been the targets of hackers for many years and public cloud providers have been able to test their defenses 24-7 against the most skilled attackers. They are one of the most attacked set of platforms that are on the internet. They obviously attract a lot of interest. Multiple layers of security provided and if you configure them correctly, you can certainly match or exceed the security that you would achieve in an on-premise data centre. The graphic here illustrates just three certifications. Public cloud providers actively adopt certifications from many different countries and territories. These three here are probably most relevant to UK-based organisations. It's notable that we do quite a bit of work with public sector and government organisations and they are absolutely happy to store government protectively marked data in the public cloud, obviously with the right designs and security services in place. Taking a look at scalability, this is a major benefit of the public cloud. Where your demands on services vary greatly, and one example would be online donation web applications. Customers can bring additional servers online as and when needed and remove them when they're not needed anymore. You only pay for what you use and there are no costs incurred for underutilised infrastructure that you have to purchase in order to deal with peaks in demand. So as the graphic illustrates, you can change the servers allocated to a particular task on a daily basis. You can also change it on an hourly basis. You can do this in response to metrics where processor load or number of incoming requests exceed a certain level. You can bring up new servers to deal with that demand. But you can also, if you know when your peak periods are, say if they're on a Thursday afternoon or Saturday morning, you can spin up new servers ready for those peaks on a regular basis just on a schedule basis. So resilience. Larger organisations will typically deploy their systems in multiple data centres to cope with possible failure of a single data centre. This requires investment in multiple facilities and infrastructure that is largely unused until a failure occurs. So you end up spending money on equipment that you really hope you're not actually going to have to use. And with the public cloud, first of all, it gives you the ability to have a multi data centre solution without that massive investment in a pay as you go model. And it really makes it available to organisations of all sizes. Even if you're protecting a single server, you can protect that with by deploying it in multiple data centres. So your users stay happy with their smiley faces even if you lose a data centre. And it's worth stating as well that for organisations large and small, that secondary infrastructure is largely costing you nothing until the time when you have to use it. There's some proprietary work that you have to do to make sure that you can spin up the resources needed in a disaster, but the servers themselves will effectively not exist until you declare a disaster. And that's the point where you start paying. So global reach, now this might not be relevant to all customers, organisations that are solely operating within the UK. It may not be such an issue. But it is true to say that the public cloud gives you access to data centres all over the world. And it is very simple to access those services. Now, you might have a fundraising organisation within the UK, but you might have global operations and you may need to support users who may be members of staff in far-flung areas of the world. The public cloud gives you the ability to serve them from local data centres without having to invest in those territories yourself. So this slide illustrates a set of data centres from one cloud provider deploying ICT in Australia with this model is as easy as deploying it in the UK. The experience is absolutely the same just because the data centre is down the road or on the other side of the world, you really don't notice the difference. And the great thing is there's just no investment required. You could spin up a server in every one of these territories today for just a few pounds and provide global services of any scale to anybody. So that's a key benefit of the public cloud. So SAS or IS, so there's some jargon here. There are two major flavours of public cloud. There are more flavours, but there are two major ones. Infrastructure as a service, which gets called IS and Software as a Service, which is referred to as SAS. With IS, you deploy servers, storage and networking in the cloud to support your applications. Examples are Microsoft's Azure platform, Amazon web services and Google Cloud. With Software as a Service, you purchase a cloud-based application and have all infrastructure built, operated and managed by a third party. And examples here would be Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce, CRM, Google Gmail. So which is the better fit? Well, a mixed economy is advisable, that's quite often the case. The majority of most organisations' ICT supports a common set of business activities. So as illustrated here, things like payroll, HR, accounts, email, time sheets, CRM, their website. These are all things that most organisations have in some shape or form. The work that differentiates your organisation and defines what it is you are and what you do is typically supported by a smaller subset of your ICT. So when looking at cloud solutions, those common business applications are ripe for Software as a Service. So off-the-shelf web-based applications that deliver the business processes that you need. Whereas for your key differentiating activities, it's quite likely that specialist or bespoke applications are going to be required. And those are more likely to be hosted in infrastructure as a Service, but could equally be specialist SaaS at the same time. So it's worth looking at what else the cloud can provide, especially for your bespoke applications. So when it comes to bespoke development, Public Cloud provides many building blocks that can be utilised to build advanced applications with a great user experience, particularly in the mobile arena. One great example is the ability to use social networking logons for your fundraising applications. Users appreciate not having to set up and manage a new set of user credentials. And as an example, Microsoft's Azure platform has ready-to-use integrations with these social network accounts that are pre-configured for optimum security and usability. So these and other building blocks connected with building web applications and apps for mobile platforms on diverse devices, so Apple, iOS, Android devices, Windows, phone devices, etc. These are the building blocks that are available in Public Cloud to help your bespoke development. So moving on to what a Public Cloud adoption could look like. So we suggest that developing a strategy coupled with a roadmap of a scope of about one to two years is a good place to start. So understanding what it is you're setting out to achieve over that medium-term period. And once the strategy is in place, planning individual projects aligned with that strategy and executing these can easily follow on. So we summarise this as Strategise Plan Act, and it can be a simple to use the jargon waterfall approach where you do your strategy across your entire estate to start off with and then gradually plan and execute a change or transformation of each element of your ICT. But it can also happen in a more agile way so that you can look at isolated elements of your ICT, a formulated strategy, and obviously plan and act transformation as you go. So when you're formulating your strategy, where should you focus your strategy? So it can be difficult to look at your existing ICT estate and know where to focus. One way that we think this can be eased is by focusing on your line of business applications, so those that support the core business activities that you undertake. So it's helpful to go through the list of systems and classify them as either line of business or supporting service. So line of business would be your website, the fundraising applications, any operational applications that you use. Supporting services can be many and varied, and in some organisations we've dealt with are vastly, you know, have far more servers than the actual line of business applications. So here we'd include Active Directory, backup, VPN, file share, direct access, things that deal with antivirus and monitoring and just general feeding and watering of your ICT services. So we would recommend that you focus on your line of business applications, and that will help you make decisions about, for example, software as a service versus bespoke or specialist applications. It will also allow you to align those applications with your business processes and priorities and drive your strategy from the perspective of business processes. So in terms of taking a smooth journey to the cloud, one area that is worth considering is the assessment of risk. So as with all new ICT developments, security assessment is advised, but do this upfront. Delay to this can occur if objections on the grounds of security are raised late in the day, with a properly documented set of risks and appropriate mitigations that is accepted and signed off by the organisation. A smoother adoption of cloud services can be achieved without compromising on security. So where I've worked with customers, it's been quite common where they've had an initial foray into the cloud. People within the organisation will fall into multiple camps, and quite often there will be naysayers to some extent who focus on a subjective reduction in security in the public cloud. I think a lot of this comes from the fact that it just feels more comfortable if the people looking after your ICT are people that you know, people who you speak to and you know their faces and you know they're part of your team and pulling in the same direction as you. But actually in the case of the public cloud, the anonymity of the people looking after your ICT is actually part of the security. So for example, in Amazon web services, they assign people to look after the security of systems who basically don't mix with each other. So if you have access to a data centre and all these public cloud platforms are quite secretive about exactly where their data centres are, and getting access to them is nigh on impossible. But if your job is to visit those data centres and maintain that equipment, you have absolutely no knowledge of what is installed on the servers and who it belongs to and what it does. And anybody who does know which customers data is held on the system is not able to actually identify precisely which servers that sits on. So because there's obscurity there, you know, perhaps on unlikely events that somebody decided they wanted to go and steal a disk out of a database server that they know belonged to a specific customer, they would find it very difficult to get the AD access and be the information required to actually identify the right disk. So those kind of obscurity of staffing can actually deliver improved security. The graphic here is just a risk matrix. It's probably familiar to some of you, scaling or measuring risk on the basis of likelihood and severity and combining those two parameters to come up with an overall risk assessment. Focusing on those that come out in the red high risk areas allows you to then focus on mitigation and actually describe what it is about the way you're going to use the public cloud or the way the public cloud platform is built that actually mitigates against the identified risks. And like I say, doing this early doors and getting broad agreement across the organisation really does help remove any inertia around this area. And that's not to say that there aren't going to be cases where it's felt that the risk of going to the cloud is too great. But those would be well defined and documented and would only be, only have the scope of those particular services and it would leave you to migrate or consider migrating other services to the public cloud without concerns about security. I really think when it comes to strategy, we would counsel that the move to the cloud is a matter of when and not if. So I say that recognizing that timescales can clearly vary, so it might be a long term move to the cloud. But it's important to realise that organisations born in the cloud don't have legacy on premise ICT to contend with and will have a natural advantage in terms of agility. So moving towards the cloud will help you keep pace with emerging organisations. In what I think is fair to say is a competitive world of fundraising. Donors have a choice of which charities to donate to. And those that get their message out to more people more effectively are likely to do better in that arena. So moving on to some case studies. So I have three case studies that illustrate how different elements of the public cloud have helped different not-for-profit organisations. So just giving. So just giving had a requirement for a large-scale analytics platform looking at how they're fundraising activities and their ability to guess in front of donors how well they're doing there. But this analytics platform didn't need to be in use 24x7. So using services from Amazon web services has allowed them to utilise much greater level of compute power to form their analysis much faster. But with reduced cost overall. So they only have to deploy this large-scale system as and when they need it. And when they're not using it, they don't pay for it. So that pay-as-you-go model, a key feature of the public cloud is what really delivers low cost. It allows you to live like kings one day. And as paupers, if that's the right phrase at other times, but essentially it gives you even the smallest that organisation access to the most immense scale of compute capability. And literally if you use it for a few minutes or a few hours, you're looking at pounds to do this. Comet relief. So Comet relief have the textbook business problem that's resolved by scalability in the public cloud. As you might imagine, a large proportion of their funds are raised on a single evening. And the ICT systems need to scale out significantly to handle that load. So you can see from the graph here that donations per minute peak at 10,000, which is approximately 300 donations a second, which is a pretty immense amount of compute power required to keep pace with that. So previously they've had to have a much greater investment in ICT systems to handle that peak load and were probably limited in what they could actually handle by what they could afford to spend on the ICT. And also that peak load meant that for most much of the time services that they had in place were idle or certainly underutilised. So that scalability of the public cloud really does help cost reduce the approach to dealing with very peaky workloads. Other examples would be charities that deal with raising money following a disaster event somewhere in the world. It gets a lot of publicity. And people want to donate and you want your donation platform to be able to accept those donations effectively. That's an area where you would set a trigger that incoming requests for your website exceed a certain threshold that you spin up another service to deal with those. So that would be based on a trigger. In Convert Leafs case they know that that evening is going to be a peak period and they can plan that ahead. And actually because they know it's going to happen they can probably get access to cheaper servers and compute resources because they're able to buy them ahead. And it's a cheaper market for them to operate in. And the final case study just illustrates how business processes can be improved using public cloud. So the National Trust have been able to take advantage of the public cloud for their operational activities. So data collection connected with managing and safeguarding properties was previously done by collating a disparate set of spreadsheets that were filled in by their staff as they visited properties. The trust were able to take advantage of the development, building blocks and SaaS solutions within Microsoft's cloud platform and quickly develop a solution that helped them vastly improve this part of their business processes. So timely access to key insights for the trust has been vastly improved. It only took eight weeks to develop the apps and now they receive data live effectively from their property visits and the people back at head office are able to analyze that data immediately and get the best business insight to what's required in terms of upkeep of those properties. So those are the case studies and with that that's a wrap for the presentation. If you had any questions I'd be very happy to take them. Thank you. So I've just been asked to remind you that you can submit questions in the question panel on the left hand side of your webinar screen. Right hand side I think actually. It's on my left. Nothing coming through at present. Give it another couple of minutes. Okay, so we're not getting any questions there. So thank you very much everyone for listening. I hope it's been useful and provided some insight. And please join us again for another webinar in the future. Thanks very much.