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Q9 Managed Servers Provide World Wildlife Fund With Secure, Reliable Hosting for Online Donations and Purchases
World Wildlife Fund Canada relies heavily on supporters to help fund a wide array of conservation activities throughout Canada and Cuba by making online donations and purchasing products from its online store. A managed server solution from Q9 Networks, featuring guaranteed 100% Internet connectivity and application hosting services, provides the secure, always-available e-business infrastructure that WWF needs.
Founded in 1967, World Wildlife Fund Canada (WWF) is one of the country's leading conservation organizations, enjoying the active support of more than 50,000 Canadians. WWF works closely with government, business and local communities to conserve the world's biological diversity, ensure that the use of renewable resources is sustainable, and promote the reduction of pollution and wasteful consumption.
To name just a few, the results of WWF's conservation efforts include protecting 96 million acres of Canadian wilderness, implementing recovery plans for endangered species, including the St. Lawrence beluga whale, and the banning of carbofuran, a grasshopper spray linked to the decline of the burrowing owl.
WWF's efforts, including field research, scientific mapping, policy initiatives and public education, are funded primarily by donations.
"In addition to the online store, our e-business activities include a secure extranet site used by a fulfillment house to process phone donations and store purchases that come outside normal business hours," says Ian Locke, Senior Manager, Online Communications at WWF.
After finding that it cost more money to process a donation via phone or mail than one submitted via its public Web site, WWF began encouraging supporters to make donations online. WWF was able to save money, which meant more funds could support conservation efforts.
WWF's online activity grew quickly. The organization developed a Rapid Input Interface to provide access to the WWF system for both internal employees and external fulfillment house staff. WWF soon reached a point where it believed reliability and support issues were critical to its future.
"We were determined to make our Web site a key part of our fundraising and communications efforts," says Locke; "But we were concerned about our system's capacity and whether our Web hosting provider could keep pace with increasing traffic."
WWF needed a hosting solution that would meet current requirements, facilitate growth, and keep infrastructure costs from growing exponentially at the same time.
After careful consideration of WWF's online business environment and technology requirements, Q9 recommended a new, completely managed hosting solution. The solution includes two high-availability, dedicated servers, centralized tape backup, 100% available Internet connection, a highly secure, dedicated firewall appliance and automated system monitoring. One server acts as the database server to manage and store information taken via the Rapid Input Interface from either online or phone-based donations and store purchases. The other server houses WWF's content management system and acts as their FTP and public Web site server. The system is protected from unauthorized access by the firewall layer residing between the two servers and between the public Internet and the database server.
All elements are managed by Q9 on a 7 x 24 basis, up to the application layer, which remains with WWF's own in-house technical team. The solution takes into account the organization's current needs while allowing for future growth.
Q9's industry-leading managed server offerings are based on standard servers and can be deployed in as little as 48 hours. They provide customers such as WWF with a range of high-density options, engineered for powerful performance and extreme reliability. Standard features include:
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Initial OS installation, upgrades and patches
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Installation in a customer enclosure in a Q9 data centre or in Q9's fully managed environment
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Real-time monitoring of hardware component parameters (such as temperature or power supply status)
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Onsite hardware sparing to ensure 7 x 24 rapid replacement in the event of a component failure
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Incident notification based on customer-defined escalation procedures
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"We saw Q9 as the best alternative," says Ian Locke. "They're a specialty hosting company; that's all they do. Their entire business model is optimized around delivering these services rather than trying to be all things to all companies. They took the time to understand our business and tailored a solution to fit our needs."
Installed in May, 2003, the implementation went smoothly with Q9 solving some difficult technical challenges in a matter of hours rather than days. For example, having to support, yet securely control three types of access to the system - public, internal staff and external fulfillment house - required Q9 to overcome thorny firewall configuration issues.
"The successful installation of the site was a real testament to the solid working relationship between the two parties and to Q9's ability to address challenges and translate technology into business value," says Locke.
To date, uptime has been 100%, with no problems or outages reported. Even during the blackout in August 2003, WWF was taking online donations from outside North America.
Through Q9's monitoring services, WWF now has a much better understanding of their capacity - how many concurrent users they can support, how much information they can serve up, how much bandwidth they need - so they're no longer concerned about having to add unplanned services. Now, they find it much easier to plan for future needs.
"Q9's automated monitoring service has been important in helping us spot potential system bottlenecks before they impact our operations," adds Locke, who has the ultimate responsibility for ensuring the reliability of WWF's Web properties.
WWF will be moving other communications, such as newsletters, onto their Web site to reduce costs and minimize their impact on the environment.
"So far, the time-cost of managing our new system has been very low; and we continue to find Q9 sales, system engineers and network operations centre people to be very knowledgeable and helpful," says Locke. "Overall, the experience with Q9 has been tremendous."
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