Software development Firm Scales Up with Windows Virtual Desktop

Our client is a reputed software development Firm in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, with a subsidiary in the United States. Our client is focused on providing solutions in the financial services sector with products for investment managers from private banks, wealth managers, RIAs, Portfolio Managers, Separately Managed Account Providers, Alternative Investment Fund managers and custodians. Their team works primarily in Microsoft Visual Studio (.net) platform with MS SQL Server database.

Use of high configuration desktops became a roadblock in March 2020, when their employees began working from home. Employee productivity suffered due to infrastructure challenges.

Adit Microsys recommended migrating them to use Azure Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) and built a collaborative workspace in the cloud. Client has successfully migrated to this platform and is extremely happy with a stable, high-performance, and hassle-free virtual environment on Azure cloud.

Customers traditionally use servers and desktops located within office premise. This is an antiquated approach in current times and is very challenging to maintain and manage for the IT infrastructure team.

COVID19 brought about a sudden shift to “Work from Home” (WFH) for services sector. Most organizations were unprepared for this sudden shift. Setting up on-premises IT infra to facilitate employees to WFH would involve sudden and significant investments in upgrading Servers, storage, Network, internet bandwidth, security products. This would require large capital outlay when economy and business prospects were uncertain. For the IT team, monitoring and ensuring infra uptime would also be a challenge, when they are also WFH and aren’t experienced in handling such a situation.

Our client faced Three main challenges:

  • setting up a secure VPN, providing sufficient bandwidth, power on-off desktops when required or not in use and such
  • In absence of active directory, once a person accessed a desktop / laptop from home, all data was at their disposal and if a person copied some confidential data onto their personal computers, client wouldn’t know, and it can result in major losses and legal issues
  • Since lot of data resided in individual desktops, accessing the same and at the same time restricting access to only authorised persons was impossible. Client needed to store data in a central place, define groups and group policies and restrict access only as per group policies

We suggested to our client to migrate to Azure WVD (Windows Virtual Desktop). Client requested for a quick Proof-of-Concept, which we were happy to carry out and demonstrated the ease and effectiveness of Azure WVD setup. We then migrated the entire user base of our client to Azure WVD on Azure cloud. By implementing WVD on a multiuser desktop OS, administrators can eliminate the cost of licenses of both the Windows Server and the client access (CAL) required to run that desktop.

Azure WVD improved upon the earlier on-premises solution by providing higher availability, faster disaster recovery, and security capabilities like encryption all the way down to the kernel. Data centralization was achieved using azure File Services and access was well defined using group policies.

While our client operations are now ready to return to a hybrid environment of work-from office and WFH, their satisfaction level with Azure WVD is very high and they will continue working with this modern IT Infra setup.