St John Ambulance has partnered with leading digital transformation provider, ANS, to help optimise its Azure cloud using the ANS co-managed cloud service. The charity expects to see the proactive co-managed service, delivered from the ANS UK based cloud service team, to deliver significant improvements in performance cost savings throughout the charity’s infrastructure transformation journey.
A household name in England, St John is a modern and dynamic charity, and has been providing first aid and first aid training for over 140 years. St John and its thousands of volunteers and staff is the charity that steps forward in the moments that matter, to save lives and keep communities safe.
Over the last few years, St John has moved their infrastructure workloads into the Microsoft Azure Cloud, allowing them to modernise, utilise better technology and start to realise the benefits that modern, public cloud computing can bring to an organisation. Now, fully into the cloud, St John approached the supplier ecosystem to find a ‘true’ partner, who can help it further flourish and get the transformation, efficiency and strategic benefits that cloud computing brings.
In a competitive selection process, St John chooses ANS to provide strategic guidance and hands on support via its co-managed service for Azure. As a certified Azure Expert MSP, the ANS team will work alongside the charity’s internal team, helping optimise Azure performance and cost, deliver the latest best practices and transfer knowledge to build skills and capabilities of St John’s people.
Specifically, St John will benefit from:
- Access to a named highly skilled customer success technical architect to assist St John to continuously optimise the Azure platform.
- ANS GLASS: a real time service management portal that provides one single transparent source of service and contract information.
- Proactive monitoring to provide a central point of reporting and visibility for component and service capacity, performance and availability.
- Financial forecasting, billing insights and budget allocation delivering costs analysis for departments, lines of business, applications, projects and cost centres.
- Governance and configuration management to monitor the platform against bespoke policies for the configuration of the platform and against security policies.
- Full incident management and response following a comprehensive incident management workflow.
St John is approaching the partnership with ANS with a long-term view and collaborative manner. The charity and ANS teams are very ‘hands-on’ and have joint ways of working as part of the co-managed service.
Speaking on the project, Sean Cooter, Technology Director at St John, said:
“ANS was the Microsoft partner of choice for us due to its accredited expertise, its collaborative and unique approach, and its track record within the NPO space. This long-term partnership between St John and ANS will allow us to continue our cloud infrastructure journey and reap the benefits that Microsoft Azure offers. Over the coming years, we expect to deliver against our ambitious long term strategic objectives, and we expect future cloud usage to deliver real value to those who we support, as well as benefitting internal colleagues.”
ANS’ board director, Joe Wolski said:
“St John has already made exciting moves into Microsoft Azure and we are delighted to continue to help them move forward into the cloud. This partnership will enable it to make use of expert technical guidance to achieve quick wins and cost-savings as well as deliver further strategic objectives on the roadmap we will deliver together through the ANS Co-Managed Cloud Service.”
