success story

Virtusa’s Desktop as a Service (vDaaS) implemented for ALM Media on AWS

Reducing infrastructure spending and manual effort

The client, ALM Media, is a media company headquartered in New York City and is a provider of specialized business news and information focused primarily on the legal, insurance, and commercial real estate sectors. ALM Media delivers leading data and intelligence, knowledge, insight, events, and audiences across the legal and business, and finance industries.

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The Challenge

With the rapid increase in remote work, enterprises have had to reevaluate their entire IT infrastructure to adapt to the changing landscape. With ALM Media, they relied heavily on a Citrix environment, which users accessed through a Citrix receiver. The challenge was that each device required constant maintenance and support so that end users could remain productive and secure. The process also involved support staff, hardware, and software purchases that took time and continuous effort to maintain, which led to a significant increase in expenses. 

ALM Media was looking to migrate its desktop applications to the cloud to ensure better performance and also cost savings. The specific challenges they faced in their Business Continuity Planning (BCP) included:

  • There was an urgent need for a desktop BCP strategy that would enable their employees to work remotely in a seamless manner.
  • ALM Media was using VPN Fortinet and observed that VPN was getting harder to manage and experienced slowness and other related issues. They wanted to explore direct connectivity to the cloud and gauge improvement in performance.
  • ALM Media had employees and third-party contractors offshore that needed access to the ALM Media environment. They were using VPN and Citrix but wanted to explore options to improve performance and gain more flexibility and scalability by migrating their applications to a DaaS access model. 
Virtusa’s Desktop as a Service (vDaaS) implemented for ALM on AWS
The Solution

Virtusa offered ALM Media our vDaaS JumpStart program on AWS so that the client could quickly resolve challenges within their own AWS environment and ensure alignment with any security, compliance, and network requirements.

Virtusa explored the applicability of Amazon WorkSpaces as a solution to replace Citrix and avoid associated costs, including MPLS. This solution also paved the way for BYOD, which was implemented in two phases.

This solution also paves the way for BYOD and will be implemented in 2 phases.

Phase 1

  • Desktop Delivery Assessment
    • Configure and setup connectivity (Amazon VPC, AWS Direct Connect) 
    • Implement Liquidware Essentials (Stratusphere, FlexApp, ProfileUnity)
  • Setup Master Image (Incl security policy integration)
    • Onboards applications
    • Rollout the image for the test group
  • Refactoring / Tuning (image/network, etc.)
    • Achieve success criteria
    • TCO Analysis (Current vs. Future state)
  • Production Migration Plan (Future state)`
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Phase 2

  • Identified application inventory, shortlisted 200+ applications
  • Engaged different stakeholders to collect inventory and identify business and IT owners 
  • Identified multiple opportunities for potential cost savings and tracked them diligently. The initiative covers AWS utilization, Opensource, and DB License optimization, that be a part of the images.
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The Benefit

With Virtusa’s vDaaS, the client only had to pay for services that were used. This solution was far less costly than a traditional staffing model and helped identify other cost saving opportunities. Other key benefits to the client were:

Valuable insights across Amazon WorkSpaces

Ability to optimize application and desktop layers

TCO / cost analysis

Satisfactory performance and user acceptance (onshore and offshore teams)

To learn more on how you can transfer your legacy applications to the AWS platform,
visit https://www.virtusa.com/partners/aws

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