Case Study: Cancer Research UK achieves secure, PCI-compliant, highly scalable live donations processing with Armor

Compliant Infrastructure Flexes Cloud Power During Live ‘Stand up to Cancer’ Fundraising Events

Cancer Research UK (CRUK), the UK’s leading cancer charity, needed a secure, highly available donation platform for its high-profile Stand Up to Cancer live fundraising show on Channel 4. The campaign required strict PCI DSS compliance to protect cardholder data, the ability to integrate WorldPay and PayPal (including queued resubmissions), and proven resilience to handle extreme, short-term spikes in traffic during the broadcast.

Armor provided a PCI-compliant secure cloud with web application firewalls, DDoS mitigation, VPN/SSL, pre-event load testing (validated to 300 transactions/sec), elastic scaling and on-site support. The solution processed 16,000 credit-card and 14,000 PayPal transactions during the 4.5-hour live show (38,000 total for the campaign), peaked at about 19 transactions/sec with no downtime, and delivered a reusable, high-performance donation platform for future events.

Cancer Research UK

Ben McCormack

Vice President of Service Delivery