The Cloud Helped the American Red Cross Withstand Superstorm Sandy Donation Surge - The CIO Report - WSJ - 0 views
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Oracle Retail on 09 Jan 13As the East Coast prepared for Superstorm Sandy, the American Red Cross's new cloud platform allowed users in the storm's path to read customized preparedness warnings and shelter information, based on their location, as they checked the organization's homepage. And when Americans reached into their pockets after the storm, a scalable ecommerce platform allowed the organization to handle as many as 75,000 concurrent donations - the most ever. The American Red Cross is merging its 400-500 chapter websites, under a new cloud platform, from Oracle Corp. , that allows the organization to scale up its capacity when a disaster strikes and users are clamoring for preparedness information, Craig Oldham, vice president of digital engagement told CIO Journal. The platform, which the Red Cross began rolling out in August, was already implemented by half its chapters by the time the storm struck. The ability to scale up allowed the Red Cross to handle a peak of more than 500,000 page views per minute, during a NBC telethon to draw donations for the relief effort in early November...