Client story Blackbaud Empowers Social Good With Application Modernization
By relocating business-critical applications to Azure, Insight helped this global software provider improve performance and security for its nonprofit customers.
By Insight Editor / 22 Dec 2021 / Topics: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Cloud Microsoft Azure
Facts at a glance
Client industry:
Software
Size of company:
3.3K employees, $1 billion in annual revenue
Challenge:
To improve scalability, uptime, security and cost management, the world’s leading software provider for nonprofit organizations needed to relocate its on-premises applications to the cloud.
Solution:
Insight provided technical and organizational support for the migration to Azure, working directly with Blackbaud customers to coordinate, execute, test and ensure the successful relocation of application data.
Results
- 14 CRM relocations and more than 1,000 NXT relocations in 2021
- Reduce downtime, lower infrastructure costs and improved scalability
- Greater agility supported by consistent scripting and automation
- Enhanced customer security with data encrypted at rest and in transit
Solution area:
Digital Innovation
Like all modern organizations, today, nonprofits depend on technology to manage their operations and deliver services to their constituents. From foundations and healthcare groups to museums and private schools, charitable organizations around the world rely on solutions from Blackbaud to fulfill their respective missions of social good.
Since 1981, the company has delivered the software, services and expertise to help their customers make the most of every dollar. With products to support fundraising, grantmaking, donor management, marketing, analytics and more, Blackbaud equips agents of change maximize the impact of their work.
Opportunities for app modernization
For many years, Blackbaud’s software solutions and company data were hosted on more than 40 different data centers around the world. But over time, the organization began to recognize opportunities to modernize and streamline the way it delivered hosted services to customers.
The existing on-premises systems made it challenging to effectively size and scale capacity to meet customer needs and limited the ability to expand services into locations without an established data center. Outdated hardware and operating systems also created obstacles to the consistent deployment of features and customizations, making it difficult to keep environments in sync. Additionally, the company lacked the ability to accurately track hosting costs or ensure complete data privacy for customers whose applications were hosted on shared infrastructure.
IT leaders knew a shift to the cloud would increase agility, security, capacity and cost efficiency, allowing them to better meet the needs of nonprofits around the world.
Finding a partner and a path to the cloud
After an internal analysis of potential vendors, Blackbaud selected Microsoft® Azure® as its preferred cloud solution. Azure offered an ideal range of capabilities and compatibility with core products based on SQL Server®.
During the consumption agreement with Microsoft in 2018, Blackbaud’s IT team began seeking out partners to support their migration project. Microsoft recommended Insight as a result of our close technical partnership and experience with Azure. Two other vendors were also carefully considered, but Insight ultimately demonstrated a unique willingness to work collaboratively within the company’s requirements to meet the immediate goals of the migration.
With the cloud agreement in place and the support of this new partnership, the project was ready to launch.
An on-premises infrastructure distributed across 40+ global data centers limited the scalability, consistency and security of the company’s flagship software products.
A programmatic migration strategy
The migration plan focused on three of the company’s flagship products: Blackbaud Customer Relationship Manager (CRM), Raiser’s Edge NXT and Financial Edge NXT.
Blackbaud’s internal IT team built out the tooling needed to relocate the two NXT products into Azure, but individual customer migrations were initially being performed on a one-off basis. Insight developed a programmatic approach to execution and took on the bulk of the implementation efforts. This included identifying eligible on-premises customers, evaluating the technical feasibility of migrating them to the cloud, scheduling and coordinating the migration directly with Blackbaud customers, then performing the relocation and validating post-migration functionality.
While the Raiser’s Edge NXT and Financial Edge NXT were largely standardized, repeatable data migrations, customers that leverage Blackbaud CRM often have highly specialized environments. This created additional layers of complexity when it came to the next phase of relocation efforts. As Blackbaud’s team developed scripted processes to set up net new CRM environments in Azure, Insight built additional scripts to assist with the export and import of existing CRM customer data. This included proprietary modules used to streamline the process of backing up and restoring IIS web configurations, SQL databases, Active Directory users and many other custom application components.
“Each Blackbaud customer is different with tons of customizations, and this was not a lift and shift but a relocation,” explained Kalam Abdul, Senior Software Engineer for Insight. “Lift and shifts are pretty straightforward, less work and low risk. Relocations are more challenging.”
Insight’s team worked directly with Blackbaud CRM customers to develop and execute project plans — from evaluation and scheduling to custom coding work, testing and support.
They also added functionality to the Azure environment as needed to meet individual customer requirements.
As the migration project extended across the global organization, Insight served as a consistent source of expertise and direction for internal and external stakeholders alike.
Jonathan Doonan, the development services manager at Queen’s University Belfast, explained the benefit of this coordination. “For the actual implementation, we had everyone choreographed down to the last minute, so we knew exactly where they should be and what they should be doing. This was a huge migration, and it wasn’t to be taken lightly. With this amount of data, you can never predict how long it will take. But because we were so prepared and had liaised so closely with Blackbaud, going live was a great success.”
Future plans for long-term social impact
Together, Insight and Blackbaud successfully executed 14 CRM relocations and more than 1,000 NXT relocations in 2021 — with plans to continue relocating customers across all 15+ products over the next few years.
The migration has allowed Blackbaud’s IT team to reduce infrastructure costs by taking advantage of additional burst capacity in Azure during major upgrades. This approach has also helped to reduce scheduled downtime, allowing routine maintenance to be performed more strategically. In addition, newly consistent scripting, standards and automation supported by Insight have simplified and accelerated general processing and delivery, while ensuring any unexpected issues can be rapidly resolved.
Most importantly, however, these modernization efforts have laid the groundwork for nonprofit organizations to grow, transform and maximize their social impact around the world. Raiser’s Edge NXT and Financial Edge NXT users have benefited from seamless functionality, while those leveraging CRM now have a dedicated environment offering enhanced security, greater availability and access to new features.
Benedict Chiu, head of data and technology for the Australian Conservation Foundation expressed the value of the relocation project for his organization. “The migration to Azure has kicked off a new cadence of upcoming work that will significantly benefit us as an organization by streamlining our operations, enabling more advanced data analytics, gaining better insight on our donors and the opportunity to utilize additional services.”
This initial engagement has established an ongoing relationship of trust and collaboration between Insight and Blackbaud. In addition to ongoing migration and modernization efforts, Blackbaud has engaged Insight to conduct a comprehensive cloud and data center strategy assessment, focusing on security and the overall data center exit strategy with the added goal of increasing velocity of current initiatives.
“[The Insight team] worked in partnership not only with their Blackbaud colleagues but with the customer,” emphasized Greg Dellas, managed services practice manager for Blackbaud. “This has led to solid outcomes and amazingly speedy turnaround for all involved.”
