When the tsunami hit in 2004, I think it was, the demand on the IFRC website went up something like 6x and it brought down the servers.
The servers were running in-house. It brought down the servers. And so one of the things we then looked at and part of the move to cloud initiative was, if that ever happens again, how do we get server-on-demand power? We're not going to have enough time to buy and install servers and bring them online. That's a number of weeks to do that.
But if we have virtual servers in the cloud and the cloud provider has server-on-demand, then that's a switch that's thrown. And so we're now more resilient. If we have a major disaster where there's a six fold increase of people coming to the website, the server base automatically adjusts to that. It costs money, but it automatically adjusts to it.
And so that increase in resiliency, which was because we were a disaster response organization, and we talked a lot about resiliency in vulnerable populations, talking about resiliency in our ability to provide services to our workers, especially our program and field people, people understood that. So that was another thing about well, pick your metaphors carefully, because if you have something that people already understand and buy into the resiliency of the populations we serve and you can apply that to something that needs to happen internally, you're better able than to sell and get adoption of that change internally. Because it looks like, or is analogous to something we already have adopted and already understand. |