Transforming Girl Effect's Digital Landscape - A Cloud Journey with Divio

Girl Effect is an international nonprofit organization with over 200 employees building media that girls want, trust, and need. They create safe spaces for girls in Africa and Asia by sharing facts and answering questions about health, nutrition, education, and relationships. Their reach is 50 million and counting.

From chatbots to chat shows, and TV dramas to tech, Girl Effect's content empowers girls with the skills to negotiate and redefine what they have been told is possible "for a girl". Because when a girl unlocks her power to make different choices that change her life, it inspires others to do so too. She starts a ripple effect that impacts her family, community, and country. That’s the Girl Effect.

As a trusted and leading name in supporting and empowering young females in Africa and Asia, Girl Effect must guarantee constant availability, security, and innovation of its online services to fulfill and surpass its existing and prospective requirements.

Girl Effect extensively leverages cloud computing for nonprofits through Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the global delivery and support of their web applications. They have an in-house team of development experts who manage and maintain these applications. Additionally, they also engage with external development teams and services, which are seamlessly incorporated into Girl Effect's web applications.

While AWS offers foundational components that need to be composed and configured, the sheer variety of its offerings - over 200 different services as of 2023 - led Girl Effect's team to decide on incorporating a PaaS.

The aim was to consolidate best-in-class components, manage deployments, and introduce a user-friendly interface that would empower both internal and external development teams to operate independently and launch releases frequently, according to their own schedule and conditions.

In early 2022, Girl Effect decided to adopt the Divio Platform to:

• Optimize the existing cloud solution in terms of cloud infrastructure services and associated costs

• Provide advanced application hosting technology

• Develop and deploy tools together with expert support to accelerate and support their web applications

• Most importantly, to significantly reduce the cost of managing cloud infrastructure combined with peace of mind

They chose Divio for their robust cloud services for nonprofit organizations, drawn by their support for open-source solutions and the Divio Platform's powerful features.

While AWS remains the preferred cloud vendor for Girl Effect, the flexibility of Divio's cloud services for nonprofit sectors ensures effortless relocation of vital applications between cloud vendors as required. These transitions occur seamlessly, without causing any disruptions to users or the distributed development teams.

Divio's Enterprise Cloud model offers top-tier cloud services for nonprofit sectors, delivering customized cloud management solutions tailored to Girl Effect’s needs. Designed with the specific needs of Girl Effect in mind, it allows for the commissioning, operation, and maintenance of a dedicated, isolated, single-tenant, public cloud region of Girl Effect's chosen Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

Leveraging cloud computing for nonprofits, Girl Effect utilizes AWS within a dedicated private region entirely managed by the Divio Platform. Unlike a shared public cloud setup where applications are deployed across multiple regions based on user preference, all deployments for Girl Effect are orchestrated and handled exclusively by the Divio Platform.

Divio's transparent pricing model ensures that Girl Effect is only billed for the actual cloud infrastructure resources and services utilized. One of Divio's guiding principles is to align its incentives with those of its clients. Hence, Divio refrains from adding any markup to the IaaS service provider's charges to ensure a true commitment to reducing Girl Effect's cloud infrastructure costs by actively scaling, optimizing, reserving instances, and monitoring actual usage.

At the center of Girl Effect's operations lies the safeguarding of customer data, compliance with regulatory requirements, and maintaining trust. A 'security-first' mindset is at the core of their development process, bolstered by Divio’s Application Delivery Platform and their technology partners.

Divio's Platform enhances cloud computing for nonprofits by supporting Girl Effect’s cloud security compliance needs through a 'secure-by-default' approach. Unlike traditional IaaS, which shifts security responsibilities to the user, Divio's Platform architecture ensures a secure modus operandi. Through cloud services for nonprofit organizations, Divio ensures that users are provided with secure environments that cannot be exposed through misconfiguration. Ongoing independent security audits provide an added layer of reassurance.

Divio Platform, being container-based, facilitates the construction of modern applications in a modular manner. This approach plays a significant role in minimizing the potential surface area for security vulnerabilities. Moreover, Girl Effect's private region facilitates secure data storage in compliance with regional laws and takes advantage of the various AWS data center compliance standards.

Onboarding is custom-tailored to fit the team structure and experience level of Girl Effect and primarily conducted online to accommodate distributed team structures. The geographically diverse nature of Girl Effect's team and the varying user profiles on the Divio platform present distinctive challenges. However, these are effectively addressed through timely and efficient support under the governance of Divio’s service scope.

Divio runs a unified helpdesk solution. This offers all internal and external stakeholders of Girl Effect a dependable means to contact Divio through a single tool and allows them to designate the severity and urgency of support or incident requests.

Support cases from Girl Effect are prioritized and assigned to a specific individual within Divio, depending on the nature of the request. This person takes full responsibility for resolving the issue from start to finish. To minimize delays and enhance efficiency, Girl Effect has direct access to Divio's experts who can swiftly address issues and engage additional competencies as needed.

Girl Effect guarantees users unfettered access to their online products and services through a strict Service Level Agreement (SLA) that promises 99.95% availability, coupled with round-the-clock incident response management and support assistance.

Divio is capable of delivering SLA-backed support across multiple clouds, leveraging multi-cloud technology to smoothly migrate to other cloud vendors in case of an outage. This ensures a uniform SLA guarantee, irrespective of the cloud vendor in use, and adds an extra layer of confidence in the event of significant cloud vendor outages.

Divio's 24/7 monitoring process enables Girl Effect to depend on proactive outreach from Divio should any issues be detected that impact the availability of Girl Effect's applications. Divio's SLA and Support Services provide Girl Effect with peace of mind, ensuring that any issues that arise will be promptly addressed.

Girl Effect regards Divio as a comprehensive technology sounding board and cloud advisor. To that end, both entities collaborated to outline a scope of Application Support and Cloud Consultancy services. Leveraging Divio's extensive Python and Django experience, Girl Effect benefits from an Application Support Service Level Agreement, which encompasses application support services and code-level support for their applications.

Moreover, Divio advises Girl Effect on various aspects of their cloud strategy. This is facilitated by the Divio support team's expertise, which spans all aspects of the stack, from cloud technologies to networking and software development.

Girl Effect fully optimized their cloud infrastructure by partnering with Divio. They gained greater control, cost efficiency, and customization through the enterprise cloud model.

Divio's security-first approach, expert support services, and role as a trusted technology advisor enabled Girl Effect to focus on its mission with confidence in the reliability and scalability of their digital infrastructure.

You can also check out our series of case studies, including the story of how Social Schools was able to completely transform and simplify Social Schools' SaaS architecture through customized cloud solutions in education.