It offers a wide range of banking services to more than two million customers, including George internet and mobile banking. As a modern bank, it has long used a number of Office 365 cloud services. This time, it decided to take the next logical step in its processes and moved its employees' endpoint needs to Azure.
The catalyst for this change was the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, at the beginning of which the bank found itself with employees working remotely from home via their PCs. However, the performance of the VPN solution was not ideal, so it looked for a better solution. At the same time, as the measures were gradually relaxed, it needed to create suitable conditions for employees returning to their offices and give them the option to use any PC in the workplace in order to comply with hygiene precautions.
The frequently changing requirements for hardware performance, flexibility and overall dynamics of the endpoint environment were covered by the bank by using Azure Virtual Desktop (formerly Windows Virtual Desktop). As this environment has met the bank's high security requirements, it is now actively used by the teams responsible for business operations and a separate AVD environment and the bank's development team.
Improving staff availability, even during a pandemic
High infrastructure flexibility according to current needs
Reduction of infrastructure costs
High level of security of banking data
The cost of the environment is lower because a single virtual PC can serve multiple users at the same time, thanks to the customized Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session operating system. The environment is scalable to immediate needs with the ability to manage the cost of power consumed.
Although the workstations are in Azure, users don't see any difference in the work. They have all the local infrastructure resources they need at a workstation that suits them, and always in a secure manner.
Finance
Cloud Solutions
We were originally looking for a quick solution to deal with the new demands of working from home in the context of the pandemic. We selected Azure Virtual Desktop as one of the most appropriate and fastest solutions to deploy to a real-world bank environment. We currently provide the AVD service for the central BackOffice for 300 users as well as the development team. The original idea of a „quick solution given the immediate situation“ has changed, and we plan to continue to operate, develop and provide AVD as a service for our other processes as well.
Miroslav Hurban
Slovenská sporiteľňa, a.s.
Team Lead of Technology Architecture
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Microsoft Azure
Microsoft 365
Member of the Board of Directors, CTO and Director of CES Division
SOFTIP
Operations Director, CES Division
SOFTIP