Advisor 360 Strengthens Infosec, Reduces OpEx with Cloud PCs

Challenge

As a technology provider to the wealth management industry, Advisor360° engages with developers worldwide to continually enhance its solutions. To provide secure access to remote developers, Advisor360° had been using on-premises VDI that delivered non-persistent desktops to remote developers. However, the solution had become too complex and expensive to maintain, requiring valuable engineering cycles to keep it running. Additionally, users were not happy with non-persistent desktops. This remained an issue, despite Advisor360°’s tools to improve the end-user experience.

So Advisor360° decided it was time to move desktop workloads to the cloud for their remote developers; de-emphasize their data center, and reduce the level of valuable IT resources being spent to maintain hardware.

As a next step, they evaluated five cloud VDI solutions. But they soon discovered that many of these solutions either lacked maturity or were too complex, requiring infrastructure and solution management. So three of these five vendors were eliminated. The team, (which had deep experience with on-prem VDI) was determined to find a comprehensive, turnkey desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) solution and a strong partner with whom they could collaborate on an ongoing basis. Matt Hallenborg (Senior Systems Engineer for Technical Operations) lead a POC “bakeoff” with Workspot and one other vendor to determine which company could provide the best cloud virtual desktop solution and the strongest partnership.

Solution

Unlike the competition, Workspot’s expert pre-sales team had the POC up and running in a few days. Matt describes a seamless Workspot POC process that involved seasoned virtual desktop and cloud experts, “that gave Workspot an edge.” Advisor360° found Workspot functionality the best overall and the admin console easy to use—leading Advisor360°’s cross-functional buying committee to unanimously vote for Workspot. From there, it was a seamless transition from the pre-sales process to Workspot’s customer success team. The team took the implementation into production, a well-orchestrated process that made all the difference. Today, Advisor360°’s remote developers use Workspot as their primary desktop (all managed just like a laptop), dramatically simplifying IT processes.