Aegis Ensures Secure Access for Extension of Critical Apps Across Devices
Innovative technologies are fast transforming consumer expectations and intensifying competition. To be game-changers in this dynamic sphere, your business has to be a player. Aegis is a leading global business services provider of customer experience management. It offers a comprehensive suite of solutions that helps your business plan deeper, transparent and better optimized customer connections and experiences- from strategy development through execution.
Ganapathy Subramaniyan, SVP and CIO, Aegis Ltd, tells us more. Excerpts:
BW CIO: How did Aegis overcome the challenge of having distributed data backup solutions and stand-alone storage across the enterprise? With the presence of multiple sites and end points to look after and manage, how was the issue of desktop management tackled?
Ganapathy Subramaniyan: Aegis is a global outsourcing and technology services company impacting clients' business outcomes by focusing on enhancing customer experience across all touch points and channels. In India, we operate across 30 delivery centres across multiple cities.
Each one of our delivery centers have an independent IT set up, a method of operation that brought with it the challenge of having distributed data backup solutions and stand-alone storage across the enterprise. Management of desktops was a concern with multiple sites and endpoints to look after. With the number of operational delivery centres, a wide variety of applications also had to be run on each desktop based on client requirement.
When the time came to choose a vendor, Citrix was the clear choice as it has the ability to offer a unified solution that could help us in managing our data and processes in a more ‘centralized’ and consolidated manner. Therefore, we could manage multiple aspects together including desktop virtualization, server virtualization, application virtualization and application delivery control.
Moving to a Citrix environment has largely benefitted Aegis in terms of business and infrastructure management. A central access to everything made application management a much easier and seamless process. Thus, enabling us to manage all our data and applications on a unified scale.
Technology is moving towards a digital era of enablement of application access anytime and anywhere across devices, including desktops, laptop and mobile devices. With this development, it is important to ensure secure access for extension of critical applications across devices.
Aegis is also going ahead with the implementation of the Digital WorkSpace Environment using Citrix. The intention is to enable secure access to business applications and data anywhere.
BW CIO: How did this impact the lead time to update any changes or install new applications for a specific customer or a new business opportunity?
Ganapathy Subramaniyan: For us at Aegis, time has always been an important resource to serve our customers. Given this, the fact that our processes were distributed in independent IT set ups was a major obstacle for us.
We found that desktop management took up most our lead time, as many different applications were run on each desktop. It was quite challenging for our teams to roll out new applications on some desktops across multiple sites and took us days to manage. However today, Citrix’s virtualized solutions allow us to release a new application across the organization within a matter of few hours.
The move from a desktop to a thin client environment has allowed us to reduce the time taken to deploy a new workstation. The moment a need arises, within a few hours the IT team is able to build, deploy and make the workstations available. With Windows 10, Mac and Linux OS on Laptops and IOS / Android on Mobile Devices, it was becoming difficult to manage the policies on the devices users were handling.
Citrix WorkSpace has enabled us to centrally roll out the updates and manage the device policy for a laptop or a mobile device. The users can now use any OS of Win10, Mac, IOS, Android, Linux and Chrome on their personal as well as corporate devices.
This move has allowed the users to stay productive regardless of their location or the device used. Compliance of the end devices to the security standards of ISO and PCI-DSS with the policies enforced through central management suite has helped centralized management of a distributed ecosystem.
BW CIO: How has moving to a centralized architecture helped Aegis? How is the situation post deployment?
Ganapathy Subramaniyan: We have witnessed smoother functioning of operational processes in a number of areas post deployment of Citrix solutions. The benefits are evident in terms of both the business and IT infrastructure. Centralization of IT architecture has helped bring the server footprint down by almost 40 percent and drastically shrunk the storage footprint by 60 percent, while proving cost-effective.
With central access, it is now easier to roll out applications required by clients across multiple locations in just a few hours. Additionally, deployment of VDI has reduced power consumption and therefore, the resultant utility cost saving.
On the compliance front, both overall audits and end-point audits have become much easier because of the unified structure. Considering everything is now consolidated and centrally managed, the auditor is able to conduct the checks at the datacenter level and does not have to visit individual delivery centers.
The Enterprise Mobility module has helped Mobile Device Management, Mobile Content Management and Mobile Application Management for devices with IOS, Android, etc. The XenMobile module has allowed the container concept to secure all the critical business applications within the container and also restrict data access between the user personal partition and the container zone on mobile device. The policies and updates are pushed centrally and can also wipe the data once the device is identified to be out from the enterprise zone.
With XenMobile module, we are able to achieve unified endpoint management of mobile devices, traditional desktops, laptops, and IoT devices through a single platform. All policies and updates are managed to comply with the security standards. The MICRO-VPN feature enables secured communication between end devices and the backend Citrix Gateway which has secured and ensured reliable data communication.
The ShareFile module from Citrix WorkSpace solution allows the users to access, sync and share files securely and easily from whatever device they use. The use of ShareFile has helped decrease storage costs by reducing the duplicate copies of data and result in increased compliance with data security and integrity as per ISO and PCI norms.
With ShareFile, we are now able to integrate with Cloud, on premise or both, within the existing instance. The policy and the secured channel ensures data access is granted basis the confidentiality and severity regulations of an organization.
BW CIO: With virtualization solutions having been around for ages, what was the apprehension to deploy such solutions for Aegis?
Ganapathy Subramaniyan: With the adoption of a new technology, there is always a certain hesitation in terms of the outcome. We at Aegis had to be more cautious of these effects, given our large customer database and our responsibility to manage this in a secure manner. When the decision to transition to a virtualized environment was deliberated upon, IT re-structuring came as the next gradual step.
Post adoption, we are definitely witnessing and reaping the benefits. The team at Citrix ensured smooth product deployment by offering their support in terms of regular check-ups and complete audit of the IT environment in which Citrix products were supposed to be used. They also offered recommendations around how we could optimize our entire IT infrastructure that includes network parameters, network core configuration, WAN configuration etc., thus making our entire IT transition much simpler.
With the Citrix WorkSpace Suite, the XenDekstop platform has become more robust in enabling access to users for various applications from multiple devices in a controlled and secured mode. This has further enhanced business productivity and customer experience.
