You may have seen viral videos of critically ill children meeting their heroes, such as wrestler-turned-actor John Cena, or being taken on trips to Disneyland. On a global scale, the Make-A-Wish Foundation has become synonymous with making dreams come true for kids suffering from life-threatening or life-changing illnesses.
The wider charity was founded in the US in 1980, but Make-A-Wish UK was launched in 1986. It relies on the time and efforts of internal staff and, perhaps even more so, a network of volunteers and charitable partners to deliver its wishes. Make-A-Wish UK granted more than 1200 wishes in its last published financial year.
However, behind this success was an ageing technology stack that relied on on-premises IT and outdated tools that couldn’t meet the demands of a post-COVID era.
For UK technology and workplace lead Oliver Wilson, technology was at the heart of how Make-A-Wish could continue bringing joy to its families at similar scales despite those challenges — but that meant changing the legacy infrastructure.
“We wanted to implement a bring-your-own-device strategy to empower our amazing volunteers, but we knew we needed a better day-to-day performance from our IT infrastructure; Microsoft Cloud provided that.”
In the middle of the pandemic, in August 2021, Wilson joined the charity, tasked with overhauling its legacy IT systems infrastructure to make it more scalable and manageable.
“We still had boxes in cupboards doing a lot of our compute functions, managing our legacy donor management and finance systems, and these were all held on-prem,” he explains.
“It was operating a dated Hypervisor virtual system in Reading, UK, which had been sufficient leading into the pandemic but couldn’t provide the scalability needed to support staff now working remotely.”
The charity had also used managed services providers in the past that hadn’t delivered what Make-A-Wish needed to support its network of staff, volunteers, and wish-makers.
This, he adds, was one of the biggest challenges for any partners who came on board: supporting a fluctuating set of volunteers who play such a vital role in all the charity’s operations. In the wake of Covid, this need was amplified.
“Many of the children we are dealing with have really complex needs,” adds Wilson. “So, we couldn’t go to houses as easily, which required a massive pivot so we could continue delivering wishes.”
The charity partnered with UK-based managed service provider Foundation IT to build out its cloud infrastructure and guide its digital strategy. Make-A-Wish picked Microsoft 365, and Microsoft’s cloud VDI service, Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), was also selected to enable remote work and provision virtual workspaces for volunteers.”
For Wilson, the combination of the Microsoft cloud solution with Nerdio’s Manager for Enterprise platform provided the ideal management platform for Azure Virtual Desktop due to its automation capabilities and scalability of virtual machines.
“Carrying out a project like this at a charity isn’t like doing it at a giant corporation,” he explains. “You can’t just pick a platform and roll it out — you have to go through several phases of vendor selection.”
He acknowledges that one key consideration was cost. Every penny spent on things like upgrading IT systems is a penny that, in a sense, could have been spent granting a wish. So, for Wilson and his partners at Foundation, getting the most out of any vendor partner was vital.
“We could have gone for an all-singing, all-dancing platform from a massive organisation,” he says. “But a lot of them were too big for what we needed, and they wouldn’t give us the scalability, flexibility or the cost savings that Nerdio does.
“The big question was, can one of my team go in there and easily spin up new resources within the Azure infrastructure when needed? With the legacy infrastructure, that wasn’t possible.”
Cloud computing is infamously expensive, something Wilson agrees with. But for Make-A-Wish, that just meant being very careful about managing cloud costs, achieved by tailoring the infrastructure to the use case at the time.
“We could have a fairly entry-level system in the cloud, but knowing that, if all of a sudden our staff hit that limit, it is going to scale with the use case and workload in the moment was vital.”
It was Foundation IT, the charity’s managed infrastructure services partner, who first introduced Wilson to Nerdio.
So, who is Nerdio? Managed services provider Adar Inc. launched the Chicago-based Microsoft partner as one of its products. However, it spun it off into its own entity in 2020 when the parent company was acquired by private equity.
Nerdio partners with MSPs and enterprises to deploy, manage and optimise Microsoft services, including products like Microsoft 365, Azure, and Intune.
Speaking to TI, Nerdio SVP customer and partner success Susie Driscoll said the company has found that as more and more enterprises shift to the cloud, they are also looking to develop their infrastructure to be more flexible and compatible.
“Our tool allows for a lot of those efficiencies,” she adds, “not only from a cost-savings perspective but also from a time-saving element that benefits a lot of our customers enormously.”
Nerdio boasts an extensive partner ecosystem that includes over 1000 channel partners and more than three million users spread across more than 50 countries, and this opens a lot of opportunities for the vendor to come on board with these renewal projects. The size of the customer can range from those with less than ten users to those with thousands.
Of Make-A-Wish, she adds: “These are the kind of stories that feel really good because you can see how this tooling drives efficiencies and how this can directly impact the children and those who need more help.”
Prior to this project, Nerdio had worked with a few other charitable organisations, but the kind of scaling needed by Make-A-Wish gave the vendor a clear business goal.
“We really wanted to focus on understanding what that business goal meant,” adds Driscoll. “Then we could say, based on that, here are the key features we really want to home in on that will help resolve those challenges. Then we start to work closely with the client and their tech partner to build that out.”
This meant leveraging Nerdio Manager to spin up VMs in Azure and adding Nerdio’s Unified Application Management tool to further improve efficiency in providing volunteers with the resources they need to deliver wishes.
UAM allows IT to automatically pre-install applications on a machine rather than relying on the first user login to cue a group policy. In doing so, Wilson can equip a volunteer’s designated desktop with the exact tools they need — ranging from Chrome to Creative Cloud and everything in between.
“We wouldn’t be able to deliver the change that we have without our partners like Foundation or Nerdio,” chips in Wilson. “Ultimately relying on a lot of goodwill, potentially getting access to software support that might have otherwise been a chargeable benefit. We have to run quite a lean team, and so some of the bigger solutions on the market weren’t tenable for us.”
One of Wilson’s biggest challenges was operating on the tightest budget while still trying to bring the best user experience to Make-A-Wish’s army of staff and volunteers. He recognises that creating complex systems or additional application portals is an additional obstacle to delivering wishes — something no one at the Foundation wants.
“Nerdio just hides in the background — our users don’t even know it exists,” he explains. “And if there are any issues, we contact Foundation first, who will triage the process. The amount of support they give us out of scope makes it the kind of relationship we value so much.”
For Nerdio’s part, the company had invested heavily in its customer success team around 18 months ago. Driscoll, who leads this team, adds: “We try to find synergies with our customers and focus on our support team to make sure they have the responses that customers need to guide them.”
Wilson says there was a “massive hearts and minds piece” during the shift to the cloud, and the adoption of Azure and Nerdio’s platform aimed at convincing those who had been burned by previous, less successful attempts to upgrade the tech stack.
“You also have your super users who are always looking for the next change, and those are vital to that journey, acting as ambassadors for the tech brand.
“What has been really positive is seeing how our volunteers are engaging with the tech more than ever. Of course, we have users who are from a less technical background, but we now have solutions which are easy to access, and we have in-house support, which is easy to access, so we can always provide them help to understand the tools.”
So, what has this meant for the charity overall? Put simply, they are seeing less downtime from users, allowing them to fulfil more wishes than ever before.
In total, Nerdio Manager for Enterprise has helped Make-A-Wish UK remove the burden of costly hardware and reduce its Azure bill by 40% each month via Nerdio’s Auto-scaling. It has also helped decrease energy consumption.
The light-touch tools now provisioned to volunteers are two-thirds more energy efficient than physical desktops and massive laptops, generating even more savings.
There are over 63,000 children in the UK currently eligible for a wish because they have a life-limiting or life-threatening condition. Though it is impossible to measure exactly how the move to the cloud has boosted wishes granted, the numbers are up year-on-year, from around 1,000 average in the last decade to over 1,200 in the 2022/23 financial year, with the charity on track to reach as many as 1,800 in the last financial year.
“This is what I always bring it down to,” says Wilson. “It isn’t about how frustrating an issue is to resolve, but that we get the problem solved, so the team member or volunteer in question is able to go out there and deliver on what Make-A-Wish should be doing, which is delivering life-changing wishes to children with life-limiting or changing conditions.”
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