success story

Virtusa implements its VDaaS solution enterprise-wide to drive efficiency and manage costs

Virtusa, a global provider of digital engineering services, systems integration, and consulting, worked with a physically distributed IT computing model. This model strained IT resources and was costly. Virtusa implemented its virtual desktop-as-a-service (vDaaS) offering for itself in order to shift from a physically distributed model to one that leveraged virtual workspaces and encouraged employees and contractors to ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD). The result was greater operational efficiency with provisioning new desktops and reduced costs. Virtusa team members also benefitted from an omni-channel work experience by being able to access their workstations on multiple devices.

 

 

The Challenge

Virtusa, a global provider of digital engineering services, systems integration, and consulting, worked with a physically distributed IT computing model.

This meant that every employee and contractor has a physically provisioned laptop or desktop to conduct their work. Having a physical IT asset for an organization of over 22,000 employees and contractors resulted in a lot of strain on Virtusa’s IT resources. Whether it was issue resolution, asset management, or just basic maintenance, IT had to manually work with every physical IT asset to come to an adequate resolution.

For example, when there were issues with an employee profile, a Virtusa team member would have to reach out to IT and work with an IT professional one-on-one to resolve the issue. This was the case for almost every issue that was encountered.

Due to these types of operational inefficiencies, it took time for each issue to get resolved, and the IT team was spending a lot of time manually provisioning and de-provisioning assets for employees as they rotated in and out of the organization, which added friction to quickly onboarding new team members. Additionally, investing in these assets was very cost prohibitive as Virtusa had to own the cost for laptops and other devices. At the same time, many employees had their own device preferences, such as Mac computers, that they wanted to use.

Virtusa needed a solution that would allow central management of IT assets and let IT resources remotely provision and resolve user issues.

The Solution

Virtusa assessed its landscape and determined that the actual need for every employee and contractor to have a physical IT asset was quite small since most software used within the organization was SaaS-based. Access to other internal software, such as time entry, service requests, compensation, and other HR services, required connecting through a VPN.

Using Amazon Workspaces, a centralized self-contained secured environment in the cloud, Virtusa optimized a Windows 10 image that replicated all the security policies that were on the Virtusa image. With Amazon Workspaces, Virtusa was also able to automate image management and optimization.

With proactive diagnostics, Virtusa also continuously monitored for certain events, such as those related to security or performance, and then trigger self-healing activities based on need. This helped for quick issues, like corruption of user profiles, and allowed for those issues to be resolved without one-on-one effort between the asset user and an IT professional.

The implementation also optimized Virtusa’s Microsoft Office 365 environment, allowing for smoother collaboration experiences.

With vDaaS, Virtusa also procured the ability to burst into the cloud. Virtusa was able to leverage a hybrid model that allowed it to still use its on-premise infrastructure for IT management, but could also quickly provision resources to onboard employees and contractors without the constraints of limited on-premise bandwidth.

The Solution
The Benefit

With vDaaS, Virtusa transitioned to model that reduced reliance on provisioning physical IT assets. Employees and contractors are now empowered to leverage a bring-your-own-device model that allows them to securely work on Virtusa initiatives on their respective devices of choice. Deploying workstations, which took at least 3-5 days, can now be accomplished overnight.

Virtusa also experienced direct cost benefits from this implementation by not having to pre-calculate capacity of on-premise infrastructure usage and costs for physical IT assets. Software maintenance also became much easier through self-healing processes. Other, more complex issues can now be handled remotely, removing the friction of having to come into an office for issue resolution. Additionally, software license allocation was also centrally managed, allowing IT to more easily re-allocate licenses from former employees and contractors to new hires and contracts.

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 Virtusa’s Desktop-as-a-Service (vDaaS) solution

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