Scottish Natural Heritage
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Solution
Company Background
Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) is a government body responsible for ensuring that the policies of Government and others secure the sustainable use and management of Scotland's nature; and to make sure it is managed effectively for its conservation and enjoyment. SNH also has the supporting aim of ensuring the efficient and effective management of the organisation in the achievement of these aims.
The organisation employs approximately 850 staff, many of them Scientists and virtually all of them IT users, operating from more than 40 offices around Scotland.
Business Challenge
One of Scottish Natural Heritage's strategic priorities is to deliver a high quality public service, maintaining an efficient, responsive and environmentally responsible organisation. In order to deliver on these priorities there is also an increased focus on information management and security.
With the increased movement of staff working from offices of other agencies a solution was required which would provide secure flexible working with access to all internal applications. A solution was also required to prevent the accidental downloading of documents onto desktops outside of the control of SNH, and to deliver a solution to offices which due to their location could only receive a basic broadband service.
The Solution
A Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution was deployed by Northgate Managed Services, aimed specifically at the staff and remote sites that could not connect to the Wide Area Network (WAN).
The desktop infrastructure is now hosted within a virtual infrastructure with the services delivered by 2 physical servers. A host machine was deployed which acts as a connection broker, facilitating the connection and management of the desktop infrastructure and assigning hosted virtual desktops to the end users. SNH uses the broker to define the managed resources and the access control policies that connect end users to the resource. The access rules are set up to identify each desktop computer and in the case of SNH the rules are based upon authentication attributes and policies.One common desktop is delivered to users irrespective of the machine they are using or the location. By centralising the desktop environment provision the majority of the processing can be done at the datacentre minimising management overheads associated with desktop environment delivery. Rather than managing each desktop individually, there is a predefined set of environments which can be delivered to employees; therefore the time required to provision a new desktop is drastically reduced. By deploying the VDI solution availability is also increased as it ensures there are no single points of failure in the delivery of the desktop environments. By virtualising desktops at the datacentre and delivering remotely this increases security and disaster recovery.
Desktops can be redeployed and updated centrally which maximises utilisation of the resources, reduces power consumption and in turn generates greater efficiencies for the organisation.
A backup solution was provided for the virtual server with backups scheduled on a weekly basis. The file is then copied to an alternative location for archiving.
The Results
This was a small deployment for a specific group of users and sites, but which has the ability for future expansion when SNH are ready. There is now a secure solution in place which allows staff to gain access to their desktop set of applications from any location with a good broadband connection.
The solution has delivered much more application functionality to the remote sites and has allowed mobile staff to have full desktop access. Security has been increased with the prevention of document downloads onto desktops not controlled by SNH. The centralised management of desktop environments simplifies the management of the systems and minimises associated costs, delivering greater efficiencies and control.
It is highly likely that this solution will be used as a template for further projects on Virtual Desktop Infrastructure at SNH.
Kenny Maclean, Head of Security, Scottish Natural Heritage commented:
"What this small but important implementation has shown is that VDI is undoubtedly a technology which can provide a solution for many issues. In this time of forced cost reduction, a large deployment of VDI whilst a significant technical project, will undoubtedly deliver cost savings over a shorter period of time than traditional infrastructure projects. In addition, this deployment has given SNH the confidence to review other areas of business that may benefit from this technology."
"During the design consultation phase, Northgate designed a solution which helped us implement the system we needed at the time. At the beginning of a new technology deployment you want your staff to gain confidence quickly, which is why SNH chose Northgate's design. We ended up with an environment that was able to meet our requirements, and in addition, an environment that was manageable instantly by SNH staff, without additional consultant support."
Benefits
- Increased efficiencies
- Improved availability of key systems
- Increased security
