Amnesty International revamps web infrastructure

Charity moves to a hosted environment as part of major overhaul

Amnesty sought to consolidate the management of its web hosting

Amnesty International has outsourced the hosting and management of its web site as part of a wider revamp of its online setup.

The platform was introduced following a thorough review of the charity’s web strategy and the need to mitigate operational issues while introducing more up-to-date functionality.

“A number of third parties looked after our multiple web sites and the problem with this arrangement was that everything was done in silos,” said Kamesh Patel, Amnesty’s head of IT.

“It was very difficult to manage the platform, let alone make improvements to it. We wanted to move away from separate agencies and move to a single supplier to give us more scalability for future improvements, more efficiency and control,” he told Computing.

It is hoped the new tools will provide better uptime and round-the-clock monitoring and support, while generating about 10-15 per cent in annual savings to the charity.

According to Patel, the hosting environment and services built on top of it provide Amnesty with “numerous methods of connection" to the internal IT systems, with direct access through a virtual private network and secure socket layers to the server level, plus application programming interface interactions at the application layer.

“These interactions will be used to service both internal and web systems to provide us and our members with a much richer experience,” said Patel.

The first phase of the service implementation covered Amnesty.org and the organisation’s central registrations system, where members are now able to log in using a single username and password, a function that was not available under the previous hosting environment.

In the second phase of development, Amnesty plans to make further use of social media tools and change the content management system (CMS) in which the web site is built. The charity is now selecting a supplier, though open-source products could be an option.

“We wouldn’t be able to change [the CMS] without moving to state-of-the art technology first, as the previous infrastructure was too old,” said Patel.

The service was provided by supplier Claranet.