This large retailer wants to equip its employees with a modern and fast 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. In the first planning phase, 2500 employees were enrolled into the new environment.
The customer's CIO had a problem that many comdivision customers are familiar with: “You are not as flexible as competitors who have only recently entered the market,” he reports. “We used to be happy when our branch managers got a Nokia 5310,” he laughs, “and that's how we grew organically. Today, many employees simply expect that they can '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 been relying on a virtual desktop environment for his employees for years, ”says Jens Hennig comdivision's lead architect for this customer, “but it is now getting on in years, is neither fit for current applications nor does it deliver an appealing performance and is certainly not expandable. This is due on the one hand to the hardware used in their own data center – for which a hardware refresh is pending anyway – and on the other hand to the not yet completed migration from Windows 7 to Windows 10 ".
It was positive that the comdivision team around Jens Hennig was able to advise the customer openly and was not committed to one or the other solution.
"The customer already uses the cloud for some of his services - e.g. for the web presence - and is planning to move further servers to the cloud" explains Jens Hennig "what could be more obvious than bringing the desktop closer to the applications and also to host in the cloud? That is why we decided on horizon Cloud. However, we have weighed up which solution is the right one for the customer, ”says Hennig,“ based on the number of licenses and we were able to save the customer a lot of money with multi-user Windows Virtual Desktop licenses, but this license model is only available from Microsoft via VMware Horizon on Azure offered ".
In interaction with Workspace ONE, the customer now has high-performance and modern desktops with fast login times and can even make these desktops or individual applications available on mobile devices with the help of Workspace ONE.
Finally, the context-based authentication, as well as the targeted use of multi-factor authentication and single sign-on, offers all employees a significantly higher level of security and, at the same time, increased ease of use.