Case Study: FHI 360 achieves 90% infrastructure cost reduction and $415,000 annual savings with Microsoft Azure

Nonprofit Uses Cloud to Cut Infrastructure Costs by 90 Percent, Saving $415,000 Annually

FHI 360 is a Durham‑based nonprofit with about 4,300 staff working in 65 countries that needed to run global projects without leaving a heavy local technology footprint. Traditional setups required costly US datacenter connections and VPNs, took up to six months to provision, and drove infrastructure costs of $60–$80K per office while causing slow help‑desk response and operational risk.

By moving email, collaboration, identity, apps and disaster recovery to Microsoft cloud services—Office 365, Azure (including Azure AD Premium, Application Proxy, Cloud App Discovery, and Site Recovery)—FHI 360 simplified access, enabled self‑service account management, and eliminated a backup datacenter. The change cut per‑office infrastructure costs by 90% (to $6–8K), sped deployments from months to days or hours, and produced roughly $415,000 in annual savings while improving security, agility, and project cost tracking.

FHI 360

Douglas Wilkins

Director of IT Infrastructure