Sport Relief is set to take over our TV screens for one night in March to bring an evening of entertainment with a serious twist, raising money for valuable causes both at home and abroad.
To make sure all the donations and technology systems run smoothly, the charity behind the event, Comic Relief, has employed Carrenza to take care of its Sport Relief technology strategy.
The companies have worked together before for the major events in the UK charity calendar but both admitted this was no easy ride.
"There are no charity shaped challenges like this," said Dan Sutherland, chief executive of Carrenza.
"You don't often get somebody stood on TV saying "go to that website" [so] it becomes the world's largest real time road test."
The charity has opted to go for the cloud model for this event due to its flexibility, according to Marcus East, chief technology officer and chief information officer for Comic Relief.
"On the night it is an unusually huge requirement over a short space of time," he said.
"The key is flexibility and scalability when processing 116 transactions per second, and it lends to this [model] rather than having servers that are used for less than two or three months."
In the technology industry the question of security is often touted as a barrier to using cloud computing and East admitted this was something the charity had to consider before implementing the solution.
"Yes, it was a consideration but one of the reasons we implemented this was, as well as providing a service, we needed to rely on knowledge delivery," he said.
"PCI compliance was needed and we have to be risk adverse but Carrenza convinced and persuaded us that this was the way to go."
"Cloud [environments] are often designed for small things, not mission critical applications," added Sutherland.
"This [solution] was designed with security in mind rather than something like auto-provisioning."
Both parties said they both hoped and intended to work as partners again for future events and planning will begin soon for the next Red Nose Day.
