Amnesty International revamps web infrastructure

Angelica Mari, Computing, Thursday 29 October 2009 at 17:34:00

Charity moves to a hosted environment as part of major overhaul

Amnesty International has outsourced the hosting and management of its web
site as part of a wider revamp of its online setup.

The platform was introduced following a thorough review of the charity?s web
strategy and the need to mitigate operational issues while introducing more
up-to-date functionality.

?A number of third parties looked after our multiple web sites and the
problem with this arrangement was that everything was done in silos,? said
Kamesh Patel, Amnesty?s head of IT.

?It was very difficult to manage the platform, let alone make improvements to
it. We wanted to move away from separate agencies and move to a single supplier
to give us more scalability for future improvements, more efficiency and
control,? he told Computing.

It is hoped the new tools will provide better uptime and round-the-clock
monitoring and support, while generating about 10-15 per cent in annual savings
to the charity.

According to Patel, the hosting environment and services built on top of it
provide Amnesty with ?numerous methods of connection" to the internal IT
systems, with direct access through a virtual private network and secure socket
layers to the server level, plus application programming interface interactions
at the application layer.

?These interactions will be used to service both internal and web systems to
provide us and our members with a much richer experience,? said Patel.

The first phase of the service implementation covered Amnesty.org and the
organisation?s central registrations system, where members are now able to log
in using a single username and password, a function that was not available
under the previous hosting environment.

In the second phase of development, Amnesty plans to make further use of
social media tools and change the content management system (CMS) in which the
web site is built. The charity is now selecting a supplier, though open-source
products could be an option.

?We wouldn?t be able to change [the CMS] without moving to state-of-the art
technology first, as the previous infrastructure was too old,? said Patel.

The service was provided by supplier Claranet.

Full story at http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2252246/amnesty-international-revamps