Dallas, Texas - April 23, 2012 - The Aidmatrix Foundation today announced that it will be using Microsoft Windows Azure to enhance disaster relief management. Aidmatrix will be transitioning many of its key business processes and applications to the Azure cloud infrastructure to achieve on-demand scalability, greater resiliency, and cost savings.
Under a nonprofit technology grant from Microsoft, Aidmatrix began a strategic investment in moving its applications to a Windows Azure and SQL Azure, cloud-based, IT infrastructure. The requirements of disaster response include on-demand scalability to support relief partners on the ground. Having physical servers deployed as close to the disaster zone as possible helps in response times for its web-based humanitarian relief applications.
Aidmatrix previously needed to maintain servers in data centers around the world to ensure that its applications were accessible when disasters struck. The former method was expensive and time consuming, but more importantly, the time required to source and deploy new hardware impacted the critical response time. Moving to a cloud-based infrastructure reduces the need to maintain physical servers and gives greater flexibility to deploy new local instances of the applications in minimal time on Microsoft's worldwide network.
The immediate impact is that 50 U.S. State and local government emergency management departments, and their 2,500+ charitable relief partners, will see improved design and performance of their relief applications as the SCM4Giving™ platform applications are ported to the cloud. Many more International Relief Organizations will receive these same application improvements to better connect with the general public around disaster as other supply chain management, volunteer management and fundraising tools are migrated.
The technology was piloted during the response to the Japan Tsunami of 2011. Michael Ross, Vice President of Delivery summarized the results: "In about two hours, we were able to deploy the web portal application to help victims of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Without Windows Azure and SQL Azure, that same project would have taken several days. In addition, we can direct the money we save from using Windows Azure - a projected 20% reduction in hard (operational) costs - toward creating and enhancing applications that help save lives."
Aidmatrix partners with more than 40,000 nonprofit, corporate, and government relief agencies worldwide, working to improve the speed and efficiency of disaster relief. Aidmatrix builds communities and tools that help groups share information within their organizations and with the relief community more easily, with a goal to reduce the paperwork and focus on the relief work.
