Law Firm Poyner Spruill's Cloud-First Strategy Encompasses "Insanely Simple" Cloud VDI

Challenge

The IT team at Poyner Spruill was faced with an aging desktop fleet and had a choice to refresh the fleet with traditional desktops or go with modern virtual desktop infrastructure. They chose VDI, running on hyperconverged infrastructure. With considerable pre-deployment effort and a huge learning curve, they began deploying virtual desktops. However, while experiencing significant improvements in the remote access experience, VDI did not live up to performance promises. Additionally, despite having the system sized by consultants, resources maxed out at about 70% deployment. Faced with having to throw more money at their on-premises VDI, the Poyner team started testing other cloud desktop solutions but became increasingly discouraged with the complexity of the solutions and the effort required to manage the cloud infrastructure. By chance, one of their IT pros discovered Workspot. CIO Ellen Kinsinger saw the tagline “Insanely Simple, Ridiculously Fast VDI” and said, “I want that!” And so began the journey to Workspot. They decided to conduct a solutions “bake-off” between the other cloud VDI solutions and Workspot. In the end, a successful Workspot pilot, coupled with affordable and predictable pricing, proved to be the turning point. They made the switch to Workspot.

Solution

“Flexibility and disaster recovery are strong arguments for choosing Workspot,” according to CIO Ellen Kinsinger. “That’s part of our argument for our cloud-first strategy in general—to have desktop as a service and infrastructure as a service so we can turn up and down those services as needed. This gives us a competitive advantage against larger law firms because now we can do the same things that they’re doing – we have the same resources in the cloud. The cloud approach secures our data better, and we are much better prepared for a business continuity event with the built-in disaster recovery capabilities of cloud desktops.” Solution elements included:

• Successful user testing of Workspot performance
• Moved from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and Office 365
• Deploy persistent Workspot cloud desktops for attorneys and staff

Like many organizations, the Poyner Spruill team has taken a multi-cloud approach to their IT services. As an Amazon Web Services customer, they can easily scale their cloud desktops across AWS and manage everything from a single pane of glass.