Versus Arthritis invests in breakthrough treatments, the best information and vital support for everyone affected by arthritis. More than 50 million adults worldwide are affected by Arthritis, with around 400,000 of these are in the UK. Versus Arthritis is the largest UK charity of its kind, helping close to 286,000 of those affected.
Introduction
VA have embarked upon a business reform and digital transformation journey to boost fund-raising and investment in critical and ground-breaking research programmes. A change that CoreAzure are supporting through the implementation of an IT platform based upon Microsoft Azure and Office 365.

Industry:
Charity
Country:
United Kingdom
Number of users:
400
The challenge
VA wanted to explore how to migrate from their internally
developed infrastructure onto a standardised strategic integration platform,
seeking a platform with the scalability and agility to utilise cutting-edge
business technologies. In doing so, a number of risks were initially
identified;
- An on-premise infrastructure with single points of failure
- Ageing applications that could not support integrated business processes
- An inability to flexibly scale capacity and compute
- Poor inter-connectivity between VA main offices in Chesterfield and London
- A large number of bespoke applications
Our solution
By utilising the Azure platform, VA have established an integrated strategic platform based upon open standards that provide the scalability and agility to exploit cutting-edge business technologies.
Moving to a cloud-based solution has been essential in enhancing integration and improving information handling potentials based upon Microsoft SharePoint. While developing more effective information management and cross-site collaboration from new digital technologies, such as IBM Watson and Skype for Business.
A cloud-first strategy is pushing digital transformation and driving an organisational change throughout VA. Having architected the right systems environment, VA can further strengthen operations and fund-raising activities through a new and improved operating model designs and capabilities.
As a trusted Microsoft partner, CoreAzure are continuing to provide strategic support at board level to further develop and empower the organisation.