Case Study - Financial
 |
Case Study FactsSituation and issues:
Solution:
|
Background to a bank on the brink of a virtual infrastructure
Tribune’s client has the complex task of supporting the varying departmental, functional and geographic needs of thousands of PC users, forming a multitude of workgroups around the world. Like every other organisation governed by increasing legislation - from the FSA and elsewhere – the job of ensuring adequate levels of business continuity and protection of data adds an extra layer of complexity and expense onto an already immense burden for IT support staff.
Tribune had become a trusted partner, working closely with the bank on business process re-engineering and change management for some time, often involving infrastructure technologies. So when it proposed desktop virtualisation as a means of reducing cost and complexity at this level, the bank had confidence in Tribune’s solution.
Hardish Hirani, a Technical Consultant with Tribune explains:
Tribune had become a trusted partner, working closely with the bank on business process re-engineering and change management for some time, often involving infrastructure technologies. So when it proposed desktop virtualisation as a means of reducing cost and complexity at this level, the bank had confidence in Tribune’s solution.
Hardish Hirani, a Technical Consultant with Tribune explains:
With the bank we had conducted a full audit of its business continuity requirements, including an assessment of the numbers, locations and configurations of contingency office suites, desktops and applications required to support relocated users. They had disaster suites all around the country on leases that were up for renewal, and were in the process of consolidating offices.
The solution we proposed is now operational. Instead of creating disaster recovery suites with desktop PCs physically configured to support dedicated groups of users, we have been able to create generic PC configurations, stored as a range of ‘master’ desktop configurations. These are hosted on a reduced number of remote servers, with the masters able to be deployed out to workgroups at any time, so that each PC image can be used by any employee. The result is a much higher return on assets deployed within the business continuity programme.
Because any change to a desktop configuration is also automatically updated in the master, there is a totally up to date set of desktop images in a constant state of readiness for deployment anywhere. As the maintenance of all of those desktops was one of the biggest challenges in the DR programme, this has reduced support costs enormously.
Tribune’s VDI solution revolutionised our ability to maintain business continuity in the event of an outage — but the benefit didn’t stop there. It dramatically reduced the cost by £1,000,000 and provided our end-users with unmatched flexibility and mobility.WAR Project Manager, a major global bank, UK
Bringing Reality to the Virtual Workspace
The corporate benefits of creating a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
There are a number of key areas where organisations are falling behind in delivering increased efficiency and flexibility to their workforce, and managing the workspace is potentially one of them. Those organisations which have adopted Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) have already realised huge benefits, in terms of reduced IT support costs, reduced exposure to infrastructure failure, and breakdowns in working processes. They have also avoided the risk of crippling financial losses as a result of hardware failure.
For them, VDI provides much better protection against disasters - or outages of some other form - and an edge against competitors slower to adopt these technologies. Tribune began working with one of the UK’s largest banks in 2004 on a project which would revolutionise its client’s ability to maintain business continuity in the event of an outage – planned or unplanned. But it did not stop there. The bank has benefited far beyond the improvement of workspace recovery contingencies and now it has dramatically reduced the cost of supporting its widespread workforce of desktop PC users. It has also provided that workforce with a hitherto-impossible level of flexibility, and mobility to work from anywhere and from any device.
Extending the benefits of virtualisation beyond the desktop
This bank may have made a quantum change in desktop infrastructure but its use of virtualisation can extend beyond that into the data centre as well, where a disparate estate of servers can be rationalised into a more coherent, easier to manage network, achieving higher levels of productivity at a much lower support cost. Based on Tribune’s many years of consolidation experience it can also provide the know-how to design the solution and phase it smoothly into production in a controlled, low risk process.
Sheldon Stoutt, CEO of Tribune, adds
We are in a market where virtualisation products and techniques are evolving rapidly and it’s hard for most people to keep abreast of what is available, what is achievable, and what it best left alone. Hence we are fortunate in having been involved in so many production rollouts in such a short space of time. Each one has added to our experience; we have built a solid team of experts, and we have used that knowledge and experience to the benefit of every new client. We encourage anyone keen to investigate how to achieve this level of improvement in business efficiency to talk to us, and to visit our demonstration centre in the City. This is an ideal way of evaluating quickly how a combination of best of breed technologies, with Tribune’s expertise, can really make virtualisation work for their businesses.