Recently I had the pleasure of assisting a nonprofit investigate the benefits of Microsoft Azure for their organization. And boy, oh boy, was I surprised at what I found. It turns out, nonprofits can migrate to the cloud pretty easily and even with significant discounts!

Free & Discounts

While I was already aware of MIcrosoft”s ~80% discounted pricing on M365 licenses, including the following SKUs:

• M365 Business Basic – Free
• M365 Business Standard/Premium – $3.00 / $5.50
• M365 E3/E5 – $9.00 / $22.80
• M365 F1/F3 – $0.90 / $2.00

What I wasn’t aware of was Microsoft’s Azure Infrastructure Grant program that awards nonprofits with up to $2,000 a year in annual savings. This is great news for nonprofits looking to explore the advantages of a cloud hosted infrastructure environment. Additional offers include free or discounted access to Microsoft’s ancillary product lines including PowerBI Desktop, PowerApps and Dynamics. Microsoft’s Non-Profit Offers

Use Cases for Nonprofits

Working with a handful of clients I’ve seen a few use cases that work well for testing out this $2,000 Azure credit.

Remote Work

With the current trends in the workforce, companies everywhere are recognizing the benefit of enabling remote work for their employees. Similarly, remote work presents a great opportunity for nonprofit companies to attract talent from across the globe and enabling volunteers from anywhere to assist in the cause. Below are a few areas where remote work could be enabled.

1. Azure Virtual Desktops (AVD)
   Virtual Desktops allow anyone with an internet connection to instantly connect to internal resources as if they were in the office. Using AVD, a nonprofit could quickly scale-up or down their operation to meet their need for immediate assistance. To give an idea of the costs associated, and how the Azure Grant can assist.
   
   A typical 20 person AVD deployment would cost around $3,600 a year. Negating the $2,000 grant and you’re looking at $1,600 for a 24/7, highly available environment ready to connect and scale.
   
2. Intune – Endpoint Management
   Nonprofits often need to protect their data just like any other institution. Intune, endpoint management can assist your employees and volunteers by quickly enabling their access to resources from their mobile devices.
   
   Even better, if your nonprofit has company owned laptops, Intune can help manage these resources, so that if one goes missing, we can quickly remove all access and ensure your data is safe. On top of that, Intune can be paired with other native services to allow for the quick re-deployment of a used device. Just think how beneficial this could be if you happen to have high turnover in your nonprofit.
   
3. Teams / SharePoint – Collaboration & Sharing
   Collaboration and Sharing are at the heart of any institution, non more so than with nonprofit work. Microsoft Teams and Sharepoint combine to create an amazing platform that enables people to work together from anywhere.
   
   Team’s Teams, Channels and Groups make it easy to simultaneously update documents and communicate all from your mobile device.

Security

One thing that can’t be overlooked is every company’s need for security. Microsoft has a long record of supporting the security community and the advancement of many of the sectors standards.

Microsoft’s cloud services all come with default levels of security that can be enhanced with their best-practice guidelines. These grants provide Non-Profits with the opportunity to modernize and secure their environments to the latest standards. The following features are but a few that are unlocked with M365 more advanced offerings.

1. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) & Conditional Access
   MFA has become a must-have for companies accessing any data remotely. On top of this, Microsoft provides a complete Conditional Access system that allows organizations to selectively lock-down any combination of Users, Applications or Locations.
   
2. Intune – Endpoint Configuration
   Does your non-profit need to control the devices that have access to company data? How about enabling a quick system setup for new users of your organization? Intune is just the tool and can be used to streamline your employee’s experience.
   
3. Azure Information Protection (AIP) – Data Loss Prevention
   Only available with certain licenses, AIP helps companies contain sensitive information to where it should be. In it’s simplest form, AIP allows the use of data labels to recognize sensitive data types (i.e. credit card information, social security numbers, etc.) and secures them with App-level encryption. Implementing this feature enables organization to sleep easy knowing their data is safe, secure and less susceptible to data ex-filtration.

Curious how to Unlock Nonprofit Cloud Benefit for your business?