Amnesty International (Amnesty) has selected managed services provider, Claranet, to provide a managed application hosting service to support its website and social networking activities.
Claranet’s service will act as a foundation for Amnesty’s digital communications strategy, allowing it to grow its online presence and reach out to members more effectively through channels such as blogs, videos and its social networking site www.protectthehuman.com.
The charity also anticipates that the service will bring about cost savings and reduce the time spent by the IT team on administration and maintenance. Having a strong online presence is essential to Amnesty’s continuing fulfilment of its mission ‘to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated.’ For example, the charity gathers real-time news and information via video footage, blogs and forum updates posted by individuals around the world as and when acts breaching human rights occur. This allows Amnesty to respond straight away, communicating news and updates to its members and online communities in order to organise protests, petitions and forums designed to support its human rights campaigns.
According to the Head of IT, Kamesh Patel, Amnesty’s online properties were previously managed by multiple suppliers. This situation was complicated and demanding to manage and made for an inadequate basis from which to build a greater online presence.
As we upped the ante online, it became clear that a hosting platform that could guarantee uptime, high levels of capacity and built-in flexibility would be, literally, mission-critical. Kamesh Patel, Head of IT, Amnesty International
So the charity decided to consolidate its providers into one trusted partner with whom it could work to build a robust platform. After a competitive pitch, Claranet won the business because it had the most comprehensive solution, the strongest SLA and provided a single point of contact for all communication. In particular, Patel said that Claranet’s SLA stood out because it covered the whole service and guaranteed application availability as a whole rather than just the technical performance of parts of the service.
By consolidating our hosting infrastructure and outsourcing the management to Claranet, Amnesty now has in place a secure footing which we can build on to realise our digital communications ambitions.
We are now well positioned to continue expanding our web presence and provide the most up to date information on world events to our online community. Claranet has eliminated our hosting complexity, freed up internal resources and provided us with a platform which will serve us well into the future. Kamesh Patel, Head of IT Amnesty International
Claranet’s managing director, Michel Robert, said
Like many organisations today, Amnesty’s online activity had grown organically, with new providers selected as and when required. This, in turn, led to contract management headaches, difficulties with fault detection due to a lack of ultimate responsibility amongst suppliers, and too much time spent by the IT team on day to day administration rather than core business and innovation. We are delighted to work with Amnesty to address these issues and help such a reputable organisation to realise its online potential and keep fulfilling its mission.
For more information please contact:
Katie Boulton, Amy Bunn and Tony Mangan
3 Monkeys Communications
Tel: 020 7009 3100
claranet@3-monkeys.co.uk