Case Study: Leading Nonprofit Organization achieves zero-downtime cloud fundraising and simplified IT with Software AG's Adabas & Natural on Azure

Building a cloud future a fast lift and shift of Adabas & Natural applications keeps nonprofit connected to donors

This conservation nonprofit, with nearly a century of history and hundreds of thousands of global members, relies on large-scale fundraising, retail and volunteer-led events to connect with supporters. As it shifted from on-premises infrastructure to a cloud-first strategy, the organization needed to move its core Adabas & Natural fundraising applications to the cloud without disrupting donor operations, while preparing its IT team and distributed volunteers for future technologies.

The nonprofit performed a fast lift-and-shift of Adabas & Natural to Microsoft Azure (using NaturalONE for development), bringing production online in under two months with no architecture changes. The move delivered zero downtime over the past year, simplified the IT landscape (fewer LVMs and disks), enabled rapid scaling for peak events, preserved DevOps workflows, and added Azure disaster recovery and backup protection for greater resilience.