Project Description
“The expertise provided by Bridgeall has enabled us to rapidly implement the AVD solution across the Group. The Microsoft technology has given our users secure, unhindered access to key company applications and a superb virtual desktop. The Bridgeall team were great to work with, completely understood our requirements and delivered a robust solution quickly and without fuss. We will have no hesitation at all in working with Bridgeall in the future”.
Jim McAllister, Global Head of Infrastructure, V.Group Ltd.
V.Group is the world’s leading independent ship management company, a global pioneer in technology, innovation and services for worldwide vessel owners.
Eighteen ship management offices and 600 staff around the world are supported by the Glasgow based HQ delivering ship technical services, risk management, procurement and financial services for the tanker, bulker, container, offshore and leisure sectors.
Consistent access to the company’s ground-breaking real time ship management platform ShipSure is critical to the efficiency of day-to-day operations.
With the shift to remote working practices across the international office estate due to the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with the poor performance of the existing Citrix RDS environment, V.Ships had an urgent requirement for the rapid deployment of a stable, low latency virtualised solution. A specific concern identified was the need for consistent performance globally when accessing critical, legacy company applications.
Bridgeall initially delivered a proof of concept project demonstrating Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) integrated within the V.Ships infrastructure environment.
This enabled the business to quickly assess its practicality for use across the Group, identify any potential challenges compared to the legacy on-premise Citrix solution, gathering intelligence and feedback from the wider user base.
Measures of success for the PoC were agreed in advance with V.Ships and included an assessment of the user experience in both the UK & India based on access to critical business applications and the virtual desktop.
Following the successful PoC, and against the background of a complex and developing Covid-19 crisis, V.Ships engaged Bridgeall to design, deliver and expedited the roll out of the full solution to their offices and clients across India, Asia, China & Australia.
Working closely with V.Ships management, the expert Bridgeall Cloud Services team reviewed the available infrastructure and networking options agreeing a design that delivered the lowest latency regional availability of AVD combined with an optimum end user experience.
The Microsoft AVD solution, underpinned with flexible network provisioning, has provided V.Ships global offices and users with secure, unhindered access to key company applications and a virtual desktop with minimal latency, maximum scalability and exceptional levels of performance and reliability.
By maximising their existing Microsoft 365 licensing, the solution will also deliver significant cost savings compared to the company’s existing Citrix licensing commitments.
With the desktop administration and management delivered from a single console the V.Ships support team will realise further efficiency improvements in help desk effort and support costs.
