Qatar Social Work enhances social services with Microsoft Azure

Qatar Social Work (QSW) serves the Qatari community through its eight specialized centers to support family stability, empower youth, and care for persons with disabilities and the elderly. It plays a key role in addressing various social and human developmental needs.

The nature of QSW’s work involves addressing complex and sensitive issues such as domestic violence, divorce, and the welfare of orphans. “We wanted to reduce the technical and operational burden on the centers, ensuring that staff can stay focused on service delivery, rather than worrying about the underlying technology,” explains Ahmed Khalil Abdulla, Director of Information Technology Department at Qatar Social Work. “We decided to look for ways to centralize the technology.”

QSW also faced technical limitations and disparities. “Previously, each center had its physical server and infrastructure on-premises,” explains Sara Mohammed Al Misaifri, IProject Manager & IT Section Head at Wifaq Center. “We didn't know the number of servers, their versions, or the licenses. Counting was done manually. We were also unsure about how security was deployed on their networks or servers, whether they were secure enough, or if backups were being taken regularly. These technical issues led us to migrate all servers to the cloud.”

Reimagining operations in the cloud

QSW chose Microsoft for its digital transformation journey. “Because we handle critical personal information, we thought extensively about security and governance. The Microsoft data center in Qatar ensures our compliance with local data residency and confidentiality regulations,” details Abdulla. “We also looked for interoperability and integration between products. That’s why choosing Microsoft was an easy decision— along with its cloud services, it also offers robust software that can enable our work in the future.”

To prepare for the move to the cloud, the organization started with a detailed analysis of the on-premises infrastructure across all centers, enabling QSW to eliminate redundancies. “Each center used to have a server for a specific service. Now, we’ve centralized it. For example, each center had its own pair of firewalls,” elaborates Abdulla. “When we migrated to Azure cloud, we centralized firewall management, reducing operational costs and alleviating maintenance that previously had to be handled by the individual centers. We slashed daily operation costs for maintaining and running infrastructure hardware to roughly 30 percent. Moreover, the time it takes to deploy new IT resources has been reduced from up to three months to approximately 20 minutes. Overall, we’ve reduced our costs by 75 percent compared to the past five years.”

Besides benefiting from economies of scale, QSW can efficiently scale their operations up or down in response to changing needs, ensuring optimal resource utilization “We now know the exact number of licenses, the servers we need, and have the scalability and flexibility to expand our infrastructure as needed,” Misaifri adds. By increasing server uptime from 95 to 99.9%, QSW has also gained the stability that its beneficiaries require.

Enhanced workflows, better community service

Next, QSW introduced modern productivity tools to further enhance operational efficiency—a move that was both timely and impactful for the community QSW serves. “During the pandemic, we seamlessly shifted to remote work, thanks to tools like Microsoft Planner, OneDrive and Microsoft Teams,” Misaifri recalls. "We could continue to work and serve the community without interruption."

The upgrade to Microsoft 365 E5 has completely transformed how the organization operates. Prior to digital transformation, collaboration was limited to phone calls, emails with restricted file-sharing capacities, or USB drives carried from center to center. “Now, staff can work on the same Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document simultaneously. We can do the same work from home as in the office, securely accessing files, mailboxes, making calls, collaborating, and screen sharing via Teams," Misaifri notes.

The staff’s response to the new tools has been overwhelmingly positive. Employees were highly receptive to training and appreciated the ease and efficiency these new digital tools brought to their daily tasks. "The percentage of employees trained in relevant technologies has increased from 60 to 85 percent. And Microsoft 365 made their lives easier, especially with features like simultaneous file editing and automatic saving to the cloud," Misaifri emphasizes, “For example, if an employee needs to share a large file, they use OneDrive, which allows them to set sharing restrictions. This ensures that the file reaches the intended audience securely and prevents data leaks.”

To bolster security further, QSW relies on a suite of Azure security services. It uses Azure Advanced Threat Protection and Microsoft Sentinel to secure its Azure environment, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud to secure virtual machines and hybrid infrastructure. QSW also covers employees' machines, network access points, and switches with Microsoft Intune and various Azure security services. “Today, the time required to detect and respond to security incidents has been cut by approximately 70 percent, thanks to real-time detection tools. The time for performing backups and recovering from system failures has been reduced by about 40 percent,” adds Misaifri.

A cycle of continuous improvement

Looking ahead, QSW intends to further its digital transformation, building upon the robust cloud foundation it has laid. The organization is in the process of adopting Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service as its primary business application across all centers. “We manage dozens of thousands of cases annually at the Family Consulting Center. The center specializing in special needs supports around 2,000 students, and the center dedicated to individuals with visual impairments serves about 300 students,” states Abdulla. “Using Dynamics 365, we will be able know in one click how many beneficiaries access the various services across all centers."

QSW also aims to employ Azure OpenAI Service capabilities to analyze data and generate insightful reports. "Currently, we have to manually prepare reports within each center. In the future, we plan to aggregate data so we can plan our resources and serve the foundation’s beneficiaries better," says Abdulla.

Finally, the organization aims to continue Dynamics 365 adoption to cover all aspects of its work. "We want to ensure that whatever the community needs, we can deliver it as soon as possible," Abdulla concludes.