This large retailer aims to provide its employees with a modern and efficient digital workplace. The comdivision project team was called in to support the customer's developers due to the complexity of the undertaking as project support. During the first planning phase, 2500 employees were migrated to the new environment.
The customer's CIO faced a common problem encountered by many comdivision customers are familiar with: “You are not as flexible as competitors who have recently entered the market,” he reported. “We used to be happy when our branch managers received a Nokia 5310,” he chuckled, “and that's how we grew organically. Nowadays, many employees simply expect to 'just' use their own mobile devices to access our internal apparel management software and other sensitive data. We solved this by using virtual desktops, but we wanted a flexible solution that not only supports desktops, but also supports mobile devices” he concluded.
“The customer has relied on a virtual desktop environment for its employees for years,” says Jens Hennig comdivision's lead architect for this customer, “but the technology is obsolete and not capable of supporting current applications or providing optimal performance, and it’s certainly not expandable. This is due to the outdated hardware in their data center, which requires a hardware refresh, and the ongoing migration from Windows 7 to Windows 10."
The comdivision team, led by Jens Hennig, was able to offer unbiased advice to the customer, without being committed to any specific solution.
"The customer already uses the cloud for some of its services - e.g. for its web presence - and is planning to move additional servers to the cloud" explains Jens Hennig. "What could be more obvious than bringing the desktop closer to the applications and hosting them in the cloud? That is why we decided to use Horizon Cloud. However, we carefully considered which solution was the right one for the customer, based on the number of licences, and we were able to save the customer a lot of money with multi-user Windows Virtual Desktop licences, but this licence model is only available from Microsoft via VMware Horizon on Azure offered ".
Through the use of Workspace ONE, the customer now has high-performance and modern desktops with fast login times. They can even make these desktops or individual applications available on mobile devices with the help of Workspace ONE.
Finally, context-based authentication, along with targeted use of multi-factor authentication and single sign-on, provides all employees with a significantly higher level of security, while also improving useability.
