The #nomakeupselfie campaign, which raised £8 million for Cancer Research UK in six days, sparked so much unexpected traffic to Cancer Research UK's website that CIO Mike Bennett believed it was under attack.
Bennett said that the charity's IT is "playing catch-up" with the fast-paced nature of digital data, spiked by outsider viral campaigns like the recent trend where women nominated each other to post pictures of themselves with no make-up on social media and send a text message donation to the charity.
During the campaign, which was not started by the charity, social media drove over 25 times the average amount of traffic to its website.
His comments came during a discussion about how Cancer Research UK, which funds 4,000 different researchers, implemented its mobility strategy, something Bennett advised IT managers not to "over-think" and to just "do it".
BYOD strategy
The charity has 1,200 virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) thin clients in its office in Angel, London. It is using the Citrix CloudGateway to extend its VDI through Citrix NetScaler and is about to embark on a full proof of concept for XenDesktop 5 to put Windows desktops on remote devices, it said this morning.
Citrix CloudGateway allows users to build an on-premise cloud to deliver web and SaaS applications.
Cancer Research has been using remote VDIs "for years" but realised it "was not enough anymore" to secure the "plethora of devices" in the workforce, Bennett said.
Now it is using Citrix's Workspace Suite so employees can access business applications like email and file-sharing on their mobiles, allowing them to use their own smartphones for work.
The IT team also needed to secure the charity's assets, which include crucial research papers compiled by external organisations.
"We were trying to deal with Dropbox and BoxWe didn't want it [files] to be over in the US" Anthony Nixon, Cancer Research UK's Citrix technical consultant added.
Generating 'millions' in revenue through mobility
Bennett said that following a successful fundraising campaign where volunteers were equipped with iPads, business users asked the IT team to deploy internal business applications.
"He said if we could have our support relationship management (SRM) application [the charity's version of a CRM] delivered to those mobile devices it could generateWell I won't say what but it was in terms of millions."
Bennett added that this took the team just "ten minutes" to deploy.
Using IT to help cure cancer
Bennett said that the IT team's main concern was increasing revenue and cutting costs.
"Our CEO said that forty years ago, one in four people survived cancer. Forty years and an awful lot of hard work later, two in four people survive cancer now. He wants to, in half the amount of time - twenty years - get that to three people in four, and that is a goal that drives us all."
In order to achieve this goal the CEO has set out nine accelerators, one being technology.
"We're like anyone else, with a chief financial officer that challenges us on our budgets", Bennett added.
"We have a personal vision that we do not want to see a single penny that could be invested in scientist's research wasted."
Picture: Holly Willoughby