Providing a robust digital lifeline for people in crisis: Samaritans

Paul Saklatvala, assistant director of IT, Samaritans, says:

"Our services must be relevant and easy for users to engage with. Younger generations, in particular, conduct their lives online.

"It's important that everyone who wants to talk to us can do it in the way that feels comfortable. Increasingly, digital communications will dominate and so we must have digital systems that are reliable and resilient against threats like cyber attacks."

Until recently, the organisation’s core digital infrastructure was in the Surrey HQ and managed day-to-day by the in-house IT team.

Paul says:

"The time was right to move to public cloud for many reasons. For example, we needed to update our systems and more and more aspects of these were being offered as software as a service (SaaS).

"We knew public cloud would give our systems the resilience they need, help us save money and give us more flexibility in how we operate."

A trusted partner

Paul says:

"We wanted to commit to a solution for a minimum of five years so it was important to make the right choice and we asked an external consultant to help us identify the best option.

"They helped us identify Amazon Web Services (AWS) as our provider and we wanted to procure this through a partner who could work with us first on the migration to cloud and then, later, re-architecting our systems.

"Ours is a unique organisation and we were clear that we wanted a genuine partner able to understand what we need and how we work."

Samaritans scoped the project with an existing supplier. It was a relatively small business with limited experience of public cloud and insufficient understanding of non-profits, so they decided to look around.

Paul says:

"We found Jisc and they 'got' us from day one. It is a non-project with plenty of experience of working with third sector organisations and they know where we're coming from."

Jisc cloud services is an AWS Consulting Partner with a dedicated AWS delivery team. The team’s specialist expertise and Samaritans’ commitment to the project enabled the migration to happen in just six weeks, helped by the fact that Samaritans trusted us to engage directly with their suppliers.

A key deliverable was to keep downtime to a minimum to avoid disrupting contact with vulnerable members of the public.

Paul says:

"It helped that our busiest time for callers is at night so Jisc could do most of the work in the daytime and keep services running smoothly when they were in most demand. We mostly left them to it. They quickly became a very trusted partner."

Ironing out the glitches

Phase two of the programme, in the first half of 2021, was to re-architect the charity’s systems to take full advantage of a range of benefits offered by AWS, including scalability, resilience and better security.

Paul says:

"Jisc’s AWS team are helping us to get the most from cloud because they can handle it all, from the redesign to implementation.

"Our in-house IT team have some experience with AWS but Jisc are the experts and they are freeing our own people up to focus on other things."

A regular, weekly call formed the cornerstone of this four-month programme, providing an opportunity to review the past week’s work and plan the next. Any necessary supplier meetings were set up in these calls, sometimes with participation from Samaritans but often without.

In between, Samaritans’ project managers had near real-time updates and they could always chat with us about progress via a ticketing system. This approach ensured a continuous flow of information and speedy progress. Even Covid-19 didn’t slow things down.

Were there blips along the way?