Office 365: Non-Profit Moves to Cloud for Global Relief

CIO - If you're an emergency response agency providing relief after a natural disaster and you can't communicate and share resources, you're in for a disaster of your own.

With field offices working with regional offices and busy relief workers scrambling to create order in hostile third world environments, collaboration and unified communication tools are no longer optional. They are essential.

NetHope, a 10-year-old non-profit consortium of IT leaders that supports 33 of the world's largest humanitarian agencies in 180 countries, knows the value of keeping far-flung workers on the same page. NetHope's member organizations, including Oxfam, Save the Children, World Vision and Habitat for Humanity, have been on the ground for the 2004 tsunami in southeast Asia, the earthquake in Japan and the flooding in Pakistan, to name a few. Member organizations also spend much of their time in Haiti and East Africa.

The core team at NetHope is comprised of 30 people who work full or part time. All program leads are full time; all are over 45 years old and many have worked in the private sector at companies like Microsoft, Cisco and Accenture.

NetHope provides everything from a geek squad that restores connectivity in the aftermath of a disaster to IT mentoring programs for local unemployed youths. It also partners with private sector tech vendors such as Cisco, Microsoft, Intel, HP and Accenture to procure technologies.

The foundation has been using Microsoft Sharepoint for five years as its intranet and as a document repository. With project teams working all over the world in different time zones it would be impossible to function without a unifying tool, says NetHope Global Program Director Frank Schott.

"Any member of our organizations can log into Sharepoint and get information," says Schott, "whether it's maps or schedules, documents about disease outbreak or an earthquake, proposals to buy new software, or documents from a three-year-old project, it's accessible in Sharepoint."

This year, NetHope switched gears slightly and migrated to Office 365, Microsoft's cloud service that includes online versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync. The foundation's use of Sharepoint won't change much, but having it packaged with Exchange, Lync and Office as a cloud service will be a boon for productivity, says Schott.

Why go to the cloud? A big reason for Schott is to free up IT staffers to do more mission critical tasks instead of babysitting servers.

"One of our member organizations, World Vision, has programs in 80 countries. They have eight offices in Kenya. Before the cloud, if the IT director wanted email he would need a server in each office, and the IT overhead and staff that goes with that," says Schott. "The ability to have those apps and data stored and maintained in an air conditioned data center managed by engineers 24/7 is a huge opportunity."