Microsoft, one of the largest technology and software companies in the world have recently announced that they will be supporting non for profile organisation in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), by offering usage of their cloud platform Azure through a new crediting system free of charge.
Azure is a leading cloud service that hosts a wide range of products and allows for such things as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) data storage and data management; all completed off site whilst services get delivered via the internet. The idea of Azure is that it allows companies to gather and store data that is relevant to their industry, turn this data into useful business intelligence to drive change and success within the organisation; all for a fraction of the cost in comparison to traditional on premise methods.
This is new initiative to support non for profits in the UAE is part of Microsoft’s larger ‘Public Cloud for Public Good’ project; where they will be donating close to $1B in resources for cloud computing by the year 2019 to tens of thousands of Charities, NGO’s and non for profits worldwide.
Chief Legal Officer at Microsoft, Brad Smith said in a statement: "We are committed to helping non for profit groups to use cloud computing to solve basic human challenges. One of our ambitions for Microsoft Philanthropies is to partner with these groups and ensure that cloud computing is accessible to a greater number of people and meets the widest range of societal needs.”
The non for profit organisations will be granted access to Microsoft’s data centres where they will be able to run application directly in the cloud; whilst using other Microsoft products for their organisation such as the customer relationship management tool ‘Dynamics CRM’ and ‘Power BI’ to gain insight into their analytics. Office 365 will also be available on Azure where these charities will be able to use cloud based extensions of the traditional Microsoft Office software.
With this scheme, non for profit organisations will be eligible for $5000 worth of annual credit to use towards their Microsoft Azure Migration or Microsoft Azure Support; which allows for organisations who otherwise couldn’t afford to move to the cloud to benefit from what the Azure can actually do for them. Qualifying organisations have the ability to renew their credits annually or upgrade to pay as you go.
This project is part of Microsoft's mission to; ‘empower every person and organisation on the planet to achieve more by investing in technology, employees and partnerships.’ They are focusing on organisations who do not have access to or can’t afford these types of technologies but need it in order to help others. Employees of the charities need to be able to collaborate all over the world at any given time or location and Microsoft Azure and make their efforts seamless as it is the perfect technology to do so.
DSP are currently supporting large organisations in Microsoft Azure; these are predominantly UK based organisation who all have the same mission of safe and secure data in the cloud; just how your data should be.