Company Overview

As a market leader in employment and education, the client has a strong capability for insights into the future of work and online employment. The client is dedicated to ongoing investment into AI and technology in order to create innovative products which connect candidates with job opportunities and help hirers find candidates in the most efficient way possible. Australian-owned and operated, the client employs more than 3,000 people across the globe.

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The problem

The client approached Mantel Group to find an answer to the where, what and how to deploy their next generation Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform. 

Throughout COVID-19, many enterprises endured challenges procuring and provisioning hardware for their newly remote workforce in the face of chip shortages and supply chain constraints. Onboarding and off-boarding was taking days, and in some cases weeks, which was having an impact on productivity and also came with significant operational costs and challenges for the team managing the rollout of new hardware.

The client was keen to provide a fit-for-purpose Desktop as a Service (DaaS) to their remote workforce in order to reduce on/off-boarding time, deliver cost savings, and meet the requirements of their global workforce without compromising on security.

This involved discussing, differentiating and producing working proof of concepts of multiple products to ensure that the product and platform selected was the best fit for the organisation.

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The solution

The Azenix team broke the work down into three key phases:

1. Proof of Concept (POC)
2. Pilot
3. Productionisation

During the POC phase, the team deployed competing products to an isolated environment to demonstrate the functional and non-functional differences between the products under consideration. To establish the POC, the team worked with the client to establish a disconnected and isolated environment using a combination of IAC and clickops. However, when compared to other Desktop as a Service (DaaS) services, it was found that Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) offering best met their requirements.

During the Pilot phase, the team took the IAC code and matured it to be production ready and deployed the production version of the chosen product overlaying the clients requirements with industry best-practices and standards, allowing them to leverage their existing technical capabilities with the new solution.

During the Productionisation phase, the team scaled the solution and tuned the automation as well as produced documentation, processes, and handover materials which included training sessions, videos and interactive sessions.

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Key products or services were used? What techniques did we use?

• Azure Virtual Desktop
• Nerdio Manager for Enterprise
• Azure Network Virtual Appliance (NVA)
• Azure Landing Zone
• FSLogix
• Private Endpoints
• Palo Alto Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW)

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The outcomes, results and benefits

• The onboarding of contingent workforce to end user compute now takes less than 30 minutes compared to an average of four days previously.
• The new solution was able to run 100 dedicated users and dozens of hostpool users in the first months of going live.
• The client is now able to offer multi-region capability to locate users close to their “home” workload region which reduces latency and greatly improves the performance for the end users.
• Substantial cost savings were achieved by reducing the number of physical devices needing to be shipped to contingent workers, drastically reducing their onboarding and off-boarding time.
• The project enabled the client to gain visibility of the security posture of the fleet of their end user compute and rapidly pivot device sku’s and team roles. No data resides on a physical computer which could be lost or stolen.

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