Infrastructure Design & Optimisation for Non-profit Organisations
Infrastructure design and optimisation is a key consideration for charities and non profits. With constant pressure on IT team resources, and often limited budgets, maintaining an effective service for users alongside the evolving demands of security, environmental and regulatory pressures, can be enough on its own.
Ensuring your IT infrastructure is also in an optimum state, with no wastage, gaps or duplication of costs, can be very challenging.
The team here at Smartdesc has a proven track record of helping charities benefit from an independent but collaborative approach to designing IT infrastructure strategies that might consist of 100% cloud, co-located in the Data Centre, or a hybrid blend of both.
Our aim is to ensure your infrastructure roadmap cuts out all the fat – running lean, secure, and fit-for-purpose whilst saving cost – giving your IT team more time to focus on continual service improvement and the user experience.
Smartdesc measure and optimise IT infrastructure using our bespoke Health Scorecard Framework:
- 12 top level KPIs built on Best Practice: Operating Model (Cloud / Hybrid), Connectivity, User Experience & Training, Maintenance & Monitoring, Backup & DR etc.
- Security Design: based on the Zero Trust principle while also ensuring smart access controls streamline the user experience – Conditional Access, Passwordless Authentication etc.
- Licensing Design: leveraging maximum non-profit grants and discounts such as Azure Hybrid Benefit, Reserved Instances, Microsoft non-profit grants programme
- Storage Strategy: blending storage types (SSD / Regular / Cold) to balance performance versus cost, ensuring zero wastage or unnecessary gold-plating
- Scalability: use of dynamic resource pools that only come onlien when needed, minimising carbon footprints and costs, and flexing with the needs of the organisation
- Utilising Service Management Plans to run and maintain the environment ongoing, seamlessly working alingside your in-house IT teams, ensuring service delivery SLAs are maintained
- Performance tracking, month-in, month-out. Includes metrics on infrastructure uptime, antivirus deployment, patching, and infrastructure monitoring alerts.
Smartdesc measure and optimise IT infrastructure using our bespoke Health Scorecard Framework:
- 12 top level KPIs built on Best Practice: Operating Model (Cloud / Hybrid), Connectivity, User Experience & Training, Maintenance & Monitoring, Backup & DR etc.
- Security Design: based on the Zero Trust principle while also ensuring smart access controls streamline the user experience – Conditional Access, Passwordless Authentication etc.
- Licensing Design: leveraging maximum non-profit grants and discounts such as Azure Hybrid Benefit, Reserved Instances, Microsoft non-profit grants programme
- Storage Strategy: blending storage types (SSD / Regular / Cold) to balance performance versus cost, ensuring zero wastage or unnecessary gold-plating
- Scalability: use of dynamic resource pools that only come onlien when needed, minimising carbon footprints and costs, and flexing with the needs of the organisation
- Utilising Service Management Plans to run and maintain the environment ongoing, seamlessly working alingside your in-house IT teams, ensuring service delivery SLAs are maintained
- Performance tracking, month-in, month-out. Includes metrics on infrastructure uptime, antivirus deployment, patching, and infrastructure monitoring alerts.
“The Smartdesc modern workplace project has been a great success, supporting culture change and leading to greater efficiency. We continue to work with Smartdesc to support our staff to achieve even more with the technology solution”
Phil Walsh, Chief Financial Officer, Mind. Read the Case Study HERE