Barnardos chief executive Fergus Finlay with Cathriona Hallahan, managing director of Microsoft Ireland. Photo by Maxwell Photography
National Cloud Week is the second annual series of events organised by Microsoft in Ireland to raise awareness of the benefits of cloud among businesses in all sectors. This year, Microsoft started the week with a donation to children’s charity Barnardos.
Each day this week, National Cloud Week will focus on different sectors that could see improvements by switching to the cloud, such as economic growth, job creation, cost savings and efficiencies.
Today focuses on the public sector as the Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation meets with Microsoft representatives to discuss cloud computing’s potential in terms of public-sector transformation and job creation.
On Wednesday, events will focus on the education sector and Thursday will see Microsoft hosting the Business Leaders’ Summit at The Aviva in Dublin with a keynote address from the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Richard Bruton, TD. Finally, on Friday, Microsoft will announce details of a National Cloud Computing Accelerator programme in collaboration with DCU’s Irish Centre for Cloud Computing and Commerce.
Benefits for all sectors
“Levels of awareness of cloud have grown significantly over the past two years,” said Cathriona Hallahan, managing director of Microsoft Ireland. “It is important now to ensure that people understand what the cloud can do for private-sector organisations – large or small – and for the public sector.”
Non-profit organisations can also benefit from cloud adoption, which is what Microsoft hopes to demonstrate with a donation of €600,000 in software to Barnardos.
“Through this software donation we will be in a position to transition our services and databases online and operate them in the cloud,” said Barnardos chief executive Fergus Finlay. “We are also anticipating that the subsequent increase in the efficiency of our systems will improve the way we operate and in turn will help us in our work with children and families in Ireland – for this we are very grateful.”
