Leading Charity dealing with Refugees Go Live!

Around 12 months ago VESK entered into a tender program against 3 other Cloud competitors to supply Virtual Desktops to a local council in Brixton with 550 users..

The Challenge

The British Refugee Council's (TRC) internal IT team had built up a number of software applications since its inception. The challenge was to migrate their entire server estate into the cloud, at first glance the server estate consisted of:

Around 12 virtual servers

Around 5 physical servers

Around 45 different software applications

3 SQL applications

Through careful planning and consolidation, VESK managed to reduce the number of required applications down from 45 to 8 needed to run the business. These applications ranged from simple software programs such as MS Office, through to CRM such as MS Great Plains with bespoke built-in SQL functions and reports.

Proof of Concept (PoC)
Through VESK's understanding and experience in the area of application migration and desktop virtualisation, we were given the go ahead to migrate TRC's main 3 applications into the cloud in a test environment for a proof of concept. The PoC took 2 weeks to build and was tested thoroughly by key staff from across the organisation over a period of 5 weeks.

Many changes and updates were required and the software install was challenging for the team, but after the PoC we assessed the results were positive... "The PoC was able to successfully demonstrate to the organisation and its staff the ability to access business critical applications from the cloud without any loss of performance or security" said TRC's IT Manager.

Planned Migration
Due to the success of the PoC, VESK were instructed to plan the live migration of the following resources into the VESK cloud:

550 mailboxes

325 live desktops

All company shared drives with security settings

All user Desktop and MyDocuments data

All user profiles, settings, favourites and backgrounds

3 bespoke software applications with accompanying data

5 software applications with accompanying data

As with all migrations the success is down to one thing, and one thing only, planning. The more we plan, the smoother the migration. We planned meticulously for 3 months and had in depth discussions with TRC's internal IT support team and their software vendors to project plan and co-ordinate to specific detail, the migration of data, applications and desktops.

We began the migration on Friday early evening at 1830 and completed on Sunday morning at 1130. Thanks to the hard work and dedication of both TRC's IT team and the VESK IT team, the migration was a success and 550 users began working on Monday morning through their new VESK virtual desktop instead of their local desktop.

Benefits to TRC

The British Refugee Council are not currently using thin clients but are considering to introduce them in the future.

TRC are encouraging flexible working so users can login at any time to their desktop.

TRC have several offices across the country, so no longer have a CapEx IT cost associated with opening new offices.

Staff are now able to successfully “hot-desk” without problems and waiting for large profiles to download across the network.

TRC have cut costs by around 35%.

Leading Charity dealing with Refugees Go Live!

Desktop Virtualisation

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