Charities benefit from cloud computing

The Cloud Circle reports.

The record-breaking sum of money received by the Sport Relief charity in 2012 came through more than 300 000 donations, peaking at an incredible rate of 149 payment transactions per second. The resilient and scalable features of the cloud have been hailed as an integral factor in allowing the charity to cope with such demand.

Over the course of the campaign earlier this year, the www.sportrelief.com Web site attracted more than three million unique visits. On one day alone, the site received 500 000 hits.

Carrenza operates and manages two core cloud platforms for Comic Relief, a donation platform and a core Web sites platform, The Cloud Computing Journal writes.

The platforms need to be able to cope with highly volatile traffic. Events such as John Bishop's Week of HellandWalliams vs The Thamescan trigger a huge uplift in donations from the public.

"We never know what's going to happen on the night," says Caroline Lien, strategy director at Comic Relief. "All we know is that we need Carrenza to provide and manage a platform that can cope with anything. The great news is that, once again, we have surpassed performance, both in terms of donations and transactions."

This approach means Sport Relief doesn't have to run physical infrastructure all year round, but can scale up by a factor of around 400 times in the peak period, The Guardian notes.

There's also a strong green benefit to cloud computing, since there aren't rooms full of energy-hungry servers running all year around.