AppSense Case Study - Local Government Surrey County Council

Summary

Surrey County Council needed to improve login speeds, enforce  GCSX Code of Connection compliance and ensure that employees were not executing unauthorised applications that might destabilise their application and desktop environment.  They turned to Centralis and AppSense to deliver a solution that "just works and has always done the exact job we’ve wanted it to".

About the Customer

Situated in the heart of South England in close proximity to London, Surrey County is the most densely populated shire county in England and is divided into 11 boroughs and districts. Surrey has a dynamic economy and a population of 1.06 million, and is highly regarded for its industrial structure and strong focus on knowledge-based industries.

Surrey County Council’s local government organisation employs 8,000 people who assume the administrative responsibilities for the region. The Council’s IT department alone employs 160 people to manage its information infrastructure including the 450 servers, 6,000 desktops and 1,500 laptops the organisation requires.

The Challenge

In 2008 Surrey County Council underwent an IT infrastructure overhaul to replace an aging and disparate legacy system built on PCs running Windows 2000. Surrey was looking to reduce its power requirements and costs as well as resolve performance issues at sites. With staff increasingly on the move it was also experiencing a growing need for users to be able to access their desktops remotely. 

To roll out its new desktop strategy, Surrey chose AppSense Gold Partner and Citrix Platinum Partner Centralis, a managed service provider specialising in secure application and desktop delivery, to plan design and implement a Citrix XenApp farm, capable of delivering core applications to both thin and fat client platforms.

Surrey’s IT environment now consists of 150 Citrix XenApp servers, 150 Novell Netware servers and 150 Windows servers, with the organisation running 500 thin client PCs using Citrix.

Girish Gorasia, Principal Consultant, Desktops and Citrix for Surrey County Council, explained,  “We recognised that we needed to upgrade our desktop strategy and that the new centralised environment would be more cost effective. However, at the same time we needed to ensure application and resource management was suitably addressed and we were aware that using a single solution to address all of these issues was key in preventing IT management costs from escalating.”

“We also needed to control user application entitlement, ensuring that employees were not executing unauthorised applications that might destabilise the environment as well as taking full advantage of the investment by making sure we had the maximum number of users per server in the Citrix farm,” Another challenge Gorasia identified was logon speed. “Surrey County Council has 300 sites, and at some of these sites the WAN is restrictive. We were keen to make sure users could logon quickly throughout this low-bandwidth WAN.”

The Centralis Solution

The Benefits to the Customer - CoCo Compliance

In a centrally administered user environment like Surrey’s, the use of unauthorised software is a primary factor in destabilising user environments and the costs associated with rectifying a corrupt desktop can be significant. Furthermore, in the United Kingdom, local authorities are assessed against a policy called the GCSX Code of Connection (CoCo), a list of security controls which all authorities need to comply with before connecting to the shared extranet. One key aspect is to ensure unauthorised software cannot be executed. 

“Surrey County Council maintains a relatively locked down IT environment, coupled with the need to comply with CoCo, it is absolutely essential employees receive only the applications they require.  AppSense Application Manager provides us with high visibility into the entire user environment and automatically blocks unauthorised and unknown applications at the point of user access. This proactive nature of the solution means minimal admin, low desktop management costs and improved security - plus we stay compliant with the Government code.”

Surrey also maximises its hardware investment, enabling a significant increase in server capacity. By allocating CPU, Memory and Disk resource to applications and users as well as optimising how user actions are processed, AppSense provides Surrey with a smoother, more responsive application set. “AppSense manages our resources effectively, allowing more users on each of the Citrix XenApp servers. Plus, by optimising our resources we have been able to reduce our power consumption, saving on costs and making us more environmentally friendly. Most importantly we can ensure predictable and reliable service levels for users.”

The Benefits to the Customer - Faster Login

To address Surrey’s slow logon times, AppSense Environment Manager was utilised to minimise network bandwidth consumption. By saving and loading only relevant areas of a user’s profile at logon and logoff, rather than transferring the whole profile across the network, logon times were reduced and the risk of profile corruption decreased. Policy and personalisation are applied to the environment as applications and operating system features are used, enabling Surrey to provide a consistent yet contextual experience for its end users. “With AppSense, we can ensure that users working at sites where the WAN is stretched receive a consistent experience, logging on in seconds instead of minutes. Corrupt profiles which lead to employee down-time have disappeared completely, drastically reducing the amount of time we spend troubleshooting and rectifying roaming user profiles.

With AppSense we deliver the security and performance benefits offered by mandatory profiles along with the flexibility offered by roaming profiles. AppSense just works. It’s always done the exact job we’ve wanted it to. The key benefit it brings to Surrey County Council end users is reduced logon time. For the IT department the main benefits have been its reporting capabilities - always having visibility over what’s in the environment, the removed potential for corrupt profiles, and enabling consistent quality of service across our 300 network sites.”

Next Steps - Improved Application Control

Surrey County Council is currently undertaking a long term project to place more of its applications onto the Citrix servers and increase its number of thin client devices from 500 to 4,000 by October 2011. Gorasia commented, “We plan to extend our use of AppSense to include license management, to simplify auditing and monitoring of our license use to reduce our application license numbers and therefore manage costs. There’s an enormous potential there that we just haven’t tapped into yet but plan to this year.”

Surrey County Council XenApp Case Study and Video Testimonial

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