Centralis Case Study Standard Life plc

Summary

Working with Centralis, Standard Life has deployed a Citrix solution which enables more than 800 diverse remote users, spanning a variety of roles, to connect securely via the Internet using Access Gateway in order to access email and line-of-business applications running on Citrix XenApp (formerly Presentation Server). Thanks to its Advanced Access Control option, Citrix Access Gateway can provide Standard Life with a more flexible and granular approach to rights-based access than other VPN appliances, giving the option to centrally control whether a user can view, download or print certain data or documents when away from a managed Standard Life office, based on the type of device, and its location and security features. Advanced Access Control intelligently senses which type of user is requesting access and then responds with the appropriate level of access.

About the Customer

Financial services company Standard Life serves seven million customers worldwide, managing assets worth £124 billion. The Edinburgh-based group, which employs more than 11,000 people, offers a range of services including banking, healthcare, life insurance, pensions and investments.

The Challenge

Early use of Citrix technology for providing remote email access to a handful of senior managers gave Standard Life a taste of what could be achieved if employees were given the tools to be more productive when away from the office. As the company began to expand overseas, and business managers were increasingly travelling for long periods of time, Standard Life’s remote access ambitions began to grow as it strove to provide more flexible working conditions for employees and increase overall staff productivity.

However, the company’s underlying IT infrastructure, made up primarily of local servers and desktop PCs, was not designed to support secure remote access to the applications managers needed, such as financial management and analysis tools. For Standard Life, a tactical and limited approach to remote access was no longer adequate; to succeed as a global player and ensure secure, flexible remote access for all employees, the company needed to include an access strategy in its business planning.

The Centralis Solution

Based on its positive experience with Citrix technology, Standard Life approached Platinum Citrix® Solution Advisor, Centralis, to help it determine a long-term technology roadmap that was closely aligned with business needs. At the centre of the resulting strategy is Citrix XenApp (formerly Presentation Server)- part of the Citrix Delivery Centre. Citrix XenApp includes the ability to centrally manage existing applications and deploy to remote users, without the need to rewrite as web applications. 

In addition to XenApp, Centralis deployed Citrix Access Gateway is a universal secure socket layer (SSL) virtual private network (VPN) appliance that provides a secure, always-on, single point of access to all applications and protocols. Standard Life evaluated six VPN providers, but ultimately decided to use Access Gateway after conducting a proof of concept exercise focusing on real-life business scenarios, which highlighted the sorts of benefits it could expect to see with a full-blown implementation. The company piloted the technology at a new hot-desking centre in Newcastle, which provides office facilities that can be shared by large numbers of users who only need to be at a desk for part of the working week. Andrew Gordon, IS Operations, Standard Life, said: "We recognised that by using Citrix XenApp and Access Gateway, we could build on our historic investment in Citrix technology to offer users even more choice in how, where and when they access our core applications such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Office."

The Benefits to the Customer

"We can set policies to tailor remote access privileges based on particular job roles," said Gordon. "As a result of this granular control, more users can be given access to the company network without risk of sensitive management or customer data falling into the wrong hands. This is increasingly important for security reasons due to sensitive data that is used in the financial services sector." These additional security measures will be particularly important as Standard Life seeks to extend remote access to information to third parties such as auditors, regulators and key business partners. Gordon said: "Standard Life is treating information access as a business objective in its own right. The Citrix Access Gateway and XenApp components are very important pieces of this jigsaw, facilitating secure, conditional access."

Standard Life’s return on investment from its Citrix solution is expected to be vast. These returns include savings of tens of thousands of pounds associated with reduced network and dial-in costs. Gordon said: "Previously we maintained a dial-in infrastructure with an 0800 number, for which we had to pay a telecoms provider. We disbanded this expensive activity and leverage the Internet using Access Gateway to provide access to the corporate network."

The company experienced many other benefits such as a likely fall in recruitment costs as flexible working reduces staff turnover. "Staff are not only happier; they are hugely more productive," according to Gordon. "Thanks to the ability to work more flexibly, many are choosing to finish tasks at home in the evenings, once they have spent time with their families, for example. They no longer feel the need to stay late at the office."

Further advantages to centralising applications include better business contingency planning. This was tested during the G8 Summit in Edinburgh. Standard Life looked to its Citrix access infrastructure to enable key business managers to work from home so that they didn’t have to battle demonstration crowds to get into the office.

Said Gordon: "Thanks to Citrix, we are a far more mobile company today. We are seeing a lot more work being done in hotels, touchdown (hot-desk) centres and airports and in our overseas offices, where users can access not only email but also their line-of-business applications anywhere they can get an Internet connection."

Indeed, although Standard Life retains its headquarters and two data centres in Scotland, many of the group’s business operations now take place overseas. "As a result of the flexibility we have gained from the Citrix solution, we can better support and deliver the needs of our global organisation," he said.

"We have aligned ourselves 100 per cent with the Citrix vision for information and application access any time, anywhere and on any device. Citrix gives us the strategic access platform we need," Gordon concluded.

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