Canterbury Christ Church University, located in the south of England, has come a long way since starting as a teacher training college with just 75 students 60 years ago. Today, it’s a major hub for healthcare and teaching professionals, a leader in STEM education, and a driving force in research that impacts local, national, and international communities. Its IT team of 68 now supports around 26,000 students and over 1,800 staff members.
With three campuses across Kent and Medway, plus partnerships with academic institutions across the globe, Canterbury Christ Church needed powerful software for its advanced degree courses. The launch of the Kent and Medway Medical School (KMMS), in partnership with the University of Kent, also required seamless access to both universities’ systems and Canterbury Christ Church desktops from multiple locations, including NHS sites.
On top of that, the university needed to enable hybrid work for staff during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Initially, the IT department rolled out generic student desktops for remote access, but the demands of scaling for so many users quickly became unmanageable.
“We needed a cloud-first strategy to cut costs and scale to fit a hybrid model,” said Dave Hailwood, Platform and Systems Manager at Canterbury Christ Church University. “On-prem solutions required too much expertise and just weren’t flexible enough for us.”
Making Azure Virtual Desktop Work
When their RDS licenses came up for renewal, Hailwood and his team made the switch to Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) to better support the University’s hybrid model and give the IT team the ability to create tailored host pools for different departments. But even with AVD, they needed more—something with a full automation suite beyond what Azure’s admin portal could offer.
“Nerdio Manager for Enterprise kept coming up in conversations with peers using AVD, and it was exactly what we needed to streamline operations and save time,” Hailwood said.
During the proof-of-concept, Canterbury Christ Church imported eight host pools from native Azure into Nerdio Manager and instantly saw the value in easier management and scaling.
“Nerdio made it much easier for my team to build and manage host pools, while still delivering great service to users,” Hailwood said. “It simplifies the complexity of native Azure but still gives us all the tools we need for custom updates.”
Boosting efficiency with Nerdio Manager
Native Azure was prohibitively complicated for the 68 person University IT team, who needed a more Native Azure was too complicated for the university’s 68-person IT team. They needed a more streamlined, automated management tool to handle the scale of the university’s needs. With Nerdio Manager for Enterprise, scaling became a breeze, and cost savings were immediate.
“The School of Engineering, Technology and Design had complex requirements with high-performance, expensive VMs. Nerdio Manager’s Auto-Scaling features saved us 70% by managing compute and storage scaling, session hosts, and profile storage,” Hailwood said.
The portal also doubles as an ad hoc service desk, giving the team control over session hosts and individual sessions to improve user experiences. With a single point of operation for all automation and AVD management, Nerdio Manager lets the IT team roll out updates in just two clicks.
Empowering IT for improved user experiences
Nerdio Manager for Enterprise has sped up AVD adoption across Canterbury Christ Church, migrating the university from RDS and dramatically improving user experience.
“Nerdio made everything easier and has allowed us to do far more with AVD than we ever could natively,” Hailwood said. “The automation and ease of use give us flexibility, letting us build tailored environments for departments while keeping costs down. Our users have never been happier.”
What used to take weeks to create a host pool now takes less than a day, empowering IT to customize desktops for the academics who depend on this technology for teaching and learning. Unlike the old on-premises solution, capacity is no longer a concern, and the improved experience has led to a drop in support tickets from students and staff alike.
