CSC picks up cloud contract with Fred Hollows

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fred-hollows

news Technology services giant CSC this morning revealed it had signed an extensive agreement to provide cloud computing services (Infrastructure as a Service) to charity the Fred Hollows Foundation.

The Fred Hollows Foundation (FHF) was set up in the 1992, just before the death of philanthropist and opthamologist Fred Hollows. Hollows was committed to improving the health of Indigenous Australians and to reducing the cost of eye health care and treatment in developing countries. The Foundation now continues to work in Australia, as well as throughout Africa and Asia. Its aim is to end avoidable blindness, as well as improving indigenous health in general.

In a statement released this morning, CSC said it had signed an extensive IaaS-based contract with the Foundation which would bring together FHF offices around the world onto a common communications technology platform.

CSC will provide FHF with cloud computing services using CSC’s BizCloud Virtual Private Enterprise (VPE) platform, according to the vendor. Contracted services will include application migration and on-boarding services as well as security migration, installation and support.

FHF, supported by tens of thousands of Australians, considers the privacy of its donors to be of paramount importance. Moving some applications to CSC’s BizCloud VPE will help to secure FHF’s private information.

Commenting on the contract award, Ram Neupane, director of business operations for the Fred Hollows Foundation, said: “Our decision was based upon CSC’s ability to provide end-to-end services, including enabling, migrating and managing our existing applications. Most importantly, FHF offices around the world will benefit from CSC’s global cloud footprint, including regional data centres and service desk operations.”

“The Fred Hollows Foundation was clear about how they believed information technology services could better support their business activities in Asia, Africa and Australia. The agility and low risk of CSC’s cloud solution, the potential benefits of our credentials in cybersecurity and healthcare, and our global reach appealed to FHF,” said Paul Gibbs, CSC’s director of cloud computing for the Australia and Asia regions.

The news comes as the adoption of the new class of cloud computing technologies continues to grow in Australia. In the area of IaaS, for example, major players such as Amazon Web Services have continued to see rapid adoption of their platforms by typically conservative industries such as the financial services sector, while State Government are also rapidly adopting cloud computing platforms.

For example, last week, the New South Wales State Government went to market for storage as a service capabilities to replace its existing in-house storage solutions, in a move that will add to the rapid ramp-up of the state’s adoption of cloud computing services. And the week before, the Queensland State Government went to market to set up a whole of government cloud computing panel which would allow its many departments and agencies to purchase IT infrastructure services in this category from a set list of suppliers.

The use of Softrware as a Service applications is also ramping up. Last week, respected analyst house Telsyte published results from an extensive survey showing that in certain categories the deployment model was now “mainstream”.

Image credit: Michael Amendolia. From Fred Hollows Foundation web site