Action for Children, one of Britain’s foremost charities has used a cloud hosting provider to create a hybrid cloud with which to support its website as well as applications, especially during peak surges in visitor numbers.

Action for Children’s Data Scientist, Darren Robertson explained how their data cloud arrangement worked.

Less sensitive data is kept with the cloud provider, whilst sensitive information (accounting for around 60% of total data) is kept separately on hard drives at the Action for Children HQ. The provider’s public cloud is used to host the website itself. This hybrid cloud arrangement also means that migrating the website is made much easier, should the need arise.

Robertson said that before using the cloud arrangement, hosting was done with their “web development agency, which was a shared environment of other charities.” This was problematic as it was expensive to change to a different agency …