OVERVIEW 

The Society for Door Step Schools (DSS) is a non-governmental organization that works towards the education of children in marginalized sections of society. For the past decade, Bitwise through Bitwise Foundation has been partnering with DSS to conduct CSR initiatives collaborating and contributing to the cause. 

COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant lockdowns disrupted the work of DSS like everyone else. In the absence of a secure and efficient IT infrastructure, working from home was proving to be a big challenge for them. Being an NGO, the limited funding that they have is primarily reserved for continuing their social programs so seeking a commercial IT solution was also prohibitive.  

What they needed was a frugal yet secure solution that could be deployed in a minimum timeframe to avoid long disruption and Bitwise helped them realize it quickly and efficiently with an innovative state-of-the-art cloud solution meeting all the requirements 

CHALLENGES 

Enabling an efficient, collaborative, and secure remote working solution for DSS came with different challenges: 

• The remote working solution required migrating from on-premises to cloud
• The NGO couldn’t afford a commercial cloud solution due to funding limitations
• The entire solution had to be highly secure due to sensitive nature of information 
• The remote working had to be fully enabled for successful collaboration amongst the team members across various locations with easy and secure accesses in place 

And all this had to be achieved in the quickest manner possible to limit the disruption to their work and to the education of the children they worked with.  

HOW BITWISE WAS ABLE TO HELP 

Designing the right solution for DSS came with a lot of constraints and challenges which required innovative approach and technology expertise that could help foresee cost challenges that the NGO may be facing in the absence of a sustainable remote working solution. Bitwise carefully considered all the factors that may affect the output in the long run and engineered the solution accordingly. 

OUR APPROACH: REPURPOSING SPARE INFRASTRUCTURE  

To cross the first hurdle, Bitwise decided to repurpose retired servers to create a private cloud for DSS, making the solution investment free.  

The next step was the successful cloud migration and implementation of remote work capabilities which meant fulfilling the following requirements: 

• All users had to have easy, non-disruptive and secure access despite the older operating systems in use
• OTP authentication had to be enabled for secure access
• Printing facility had to be restricted to their office only – which required a site-to-site VPN to be enabled between Bitwise premise and DSS premise
• Firewall was reconfigured to allow these permissions
• And most importantly, the users had to be trained with demonstrations for these remote accesses and collaboration capabilities across locations

Step by step, Bitwise team fulfilled all these requirements and enabled a secure, efficient, frugal, and sustainable remote working solution via private cloud migration for DSS.  

HOW THE SOLUTION ALIGNED WITH DSS’ EXACT REQUIREMENTS 

Limited financial, technical, and infrastructural resources were the central challenge that DSS faced along with the need for quick deployment. Understanding the urgency, Bitwise chalked out the plan of action within a few days and started simultaneous implementation, which was accomplished within a couple of weeks.  

THE WAY FORWARD 

During the pandemic, DSS and many other NGOs faced great challenges in continuing their work. While developing this solution what we experienced is that some – if not most – of these challenges can be resolved by efficient use of technology. By leveraging cloud solutions, DSS has become better equipped to deal with these challenging times and is continuing to create a positive impact through its work.  

Bitwise is contributing towards social change by leveraging the expertise in technology and innovation. Enabling this solution for DSS by democratizing cloud was one small step towards that goal and it has inspired us to continue to look for more innovative ways of making technology an enabler for the social good.