September 2009 – Clearpath Hosting is pleased to announce that it has been selected to provide Cloud Hosting services for UNCF.
The technology demands of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) have been growing exponentially, with more operations moving to a web-based model. The capital expenses required to build and scale this environment, especially as difficult economic times have driven more students to apply for scholarships, have increased dramatically. Overall, UNCF was spending millions annually to build, deploy and refresh its internet and internal technology operations. Quite often, the organization was challenged by inadequate service from external vendors that kept them a step behind the latest technology.
Clearpath Hosting developed a cloud-based solution tailored to meet their unique needs. This solution, which frees UNCF from the burden of maintaining their own infrastructure and provides on-demand access to technology resources with 99.99% Uptime and Performance SLAs, enabled UNCF to successfully launch several new web applications within days of selecting Clearpath. This includes their Gates Millennium Scholars Program – sponsored by the Gates Foundation, which provides over $1 Billion in scholarship funding for minority students.
By transitioning away from acquiring and maintaining it’s own IT infrastructure, UNCF is positioned to:
· Use human capital more effectively
· Move strategic technology initiatives forward at lightning speed
· Significantly reduce capital expenditures
· Focus more on students and scholarships than servers and storage
Ultimately, this will allow them to focus more resources on fulfilling their mission of enabling more students to attend college. Today, more than 60% of UNCF students are the first in their family to attend college – at a time when a college degree is a requirement for nearly any well-paying career.
In addition, the cloud solution has enhanced their operational efficiency and allowed for better utilization of resources. Many organizations experience “peak seasons” of irregularly high volume and UNCF is no exception. The Clearpath Hosting solution allows them to pay for only what they use and quickly scales up or down as their volume and needs change. This prevents costly “over-buying” of IT assets that are idle for all but a few weeks each year.
Not only do cloud solutions offer operational and financial benefits, but they also assist with disaster recovery and application development by utilizing existing resources to their fullest capacity. Virtualization allows for more and faster data replication and back-up to remote locations. This allows organizations to better manage and maintain one of their most important (and growing) assets – their data.
Clearpath Hosting is a subsidiary of Clearpath Solutions Group, a leading provider of IT infrastructure solutions and consulting services to over 300 clients across a wide spectrum of industries. With a focus on data management solutions, Clearpath seeks to empower its clients by providing access to the latest technologies and now an “Infrastructure as a Service” approach to managing business networks. Contact us today at 866-892-3154 to schedule an Infrastructure Assessment for your organization.
