About the customer
A large State Government department with over 5,000 staff.
Problem Statement
As a result of COVID-19, the customer had an urgent requirement to enable a scalable, secureremote working solution. The customer is already heavily invested in Microsoft and licensed for M365, it made sense that a cloud-based virtual desktop environment, based on Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop(WVD) would be considered.
Solution
Olikka has extensive experience delivering remote working enablement solutions for enterprise companies. In response to COVID-19, to minimise disruption and help our customers stay productive during this challenging time, Olikka developed a WVD Quick Enablement solution.
WVD provided the customer with a scalable, secure desktop and app virtualisation service. WVD simplifies management requirements and provides the option of multi-session Windows 10 to reduce per-user costs, as well as application lockdowns and optimisations for Office 365 ProPlus using FSLogix.
For the customer, a quick solution turnaround and fast team onboarding were essential. Olikka was able to launch a WVD solution within a week of sign off, providing an alternative to the existing VMware on-premises Horizon solution. As well as fast onboarding, a cost-benefit assessment was performed, highlighting cost reduction benefits - the department only pays for what they use.
Olikka worked closely with the customer team to re-use collateral from the legacy system to deploy into WVD. Not only did this cut deployment time and provided simplified management from an admin perspective, but it also provided staff with a familiar and easy environment to manage.
Most importantly, Olikka has employed cloud security best practice and has meant that the WVD implementation has been deployed against the existing SOE security baseline. Locking down access to WVD via Azure AD conditional access policies such as enforced Multi Factor Authentication has ensured that connections only come from trusted locations and/or devices.
Benefits
The customer now has a secure, effective remote worker solution which has now had access provided to approximately 600 staff, with plans to ramp up usage into the future. The fast WVD deployment has shown the capability of WVD to cut costs, provide simplified management, aligned with the other Microsoft suite of products and is kept safe by Microsoft cloud security, providing peace of mind and freeing up customer resources.
