Our Social Impact: Technical Support for the YMCA | Cosmic Skip to main content

Our Social Impact: Technical Support for the YMCA

Every year we produce our Social Impact Report. Filled with Case Studies, statistics and stories, our report captures the range of work that Cosmic has achieved over the previous year.

Read on to discover one of the stories from our Social Impact Report from 2021

With Cosmic’s support, YMCA Dulverton Group moved to a fully Cloud environment in 2021!

YMCA Dulverton Group are a local community charity, delivering life changing services to over 10,000 children, young people and families across Somerset and Devon every year. Part of the larger YMCA group YMCAs in England impact on nearly 600,000 lives every year:

● Every year 228,000 young people are intensively supported by YMCA

● YMCA provides 10,000 beds for young people every night

● YMCA helps almost 43,000 people every year to engage in education, skills and training

● YMCAs serve over 530 different communities across the country

● YMCA volunteers dedicate almost 800,000 hours of their time to help young people

YMCA Dulverton Group approached Cosmic to provide Technical Support and consultancy services back in 2019. As a fellow Social Enterprise and forward-thinking organisation, YMCA Dulverton felt aligned to Cosmic in both values and mission.

Since then, Cosmic has worked closely with the YMCA to provide both technical support services and to implement a digital roadmap to help them achieve their ambition of a fully cloud environment.

During 2021, Cosmic began work on planning the next phase of implementation of YMCA’s Digital roadmap - the migration of the organisation’s legacy on-premise services to a cloud hosted Microsoft Azure platform.

During this time, Cosmic worked with YMCA Dulverton Group to assist them to secure donated credits to the value of $3500 per year for use with Microsoft Azure services. This enabled the organisation to off-set a substantial portion of their Microsoft costs for cloud hosting. With an active account and a Microsoft donation in place, Cosmic then mounted an Azure Remote Desktop server hosted by Microsoft for the organisation and migrated the remaining on-premise services to the cloud.

The project was delivered ahead of time and allowed for the decommissioning of their aging on-premises server.

The infrastructure to support an organisation spread over multiple sites and localities, such as is the case with YMCA Dulverton Group, can get very complex with multiple points of failure. With the full migration to cloud, YMCA Dulverton Group now benefits from a robust infrastructure, positioning it to better to support their many service users.

The move to Azure also brought with it enhanced security a key consideration for any organisation in the 21st century.

"Cosmic deliver high levels of customer service and are always quick to offer support when needed. The team are friendly, professional and helpful and we would highly recommend them." - YMCA Dulverton Group

Want to read the rest of the report? Check it out here!