Founded in 1880 as a non-traditional lender to help people access financing and goods, Vanquis Bank is now a publicly traded company on the London Stock Exchange with around 1.7 million customers. Nearly 150 years later, the organization’s mission remains the same — putting customers on the path to a better everyday life.
In an effort to continue to provide the best possible resources to the bank’s customers, Client Engineering Lead Vikki Palmer and her team work diligently behind the scenes to ensure that all their colleagues have the technological capabilities to quickly and reliably serve customers across devices.
“We had previously been using an old, clunky legacy infrastructure that was inefficient and generated a lot of complaints from employees regarding their poor user experiences,” said Palmer. “Once support ran out, we knew we needed to migrate to the cloud and wanted a virtual desktop solution that would provide our agents with secure, reliable access from anywhere.”
Because Vanquis was already using Microsoft widely across the organization, Azure and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) were the natural choices. Once the proof of concept (POC) was underway, Palmer’s team was immediately impressed with the improvement in efficiency and performance. But with a limited number of engineers dedicated to remote access, they would need additional support in managing the nearly 2,000 AVD seats across the organization.
Small teams doing big things
Seeing the challenge that faced Palmer’s small but mighty team, a contractor who had been brought on to get AVD up and running introduced them to Nerdio after he’d seen the platform’s impact on a previous project.
“We kind of fell into our relationship with Nerdio, but as it turns out, Nerdio Manager for Enterprise is exactly what my team needed,” Palmer noted. “Not only has the platform automated so much of the team’s work, but it fits seamlessly into our existing Microsoft ecosystem and meets our specific security requirements.”
Naturally, Vanquis Bank’s cybersecurity team is extremely risk-averse, so each business unit requires its own host pool with very granular permission levels and admin rights. Additionally, each host pool needs to be customized for each specific team’s schedule and resource needs. That amounts to 86 host pools and 503 machines overseen by as few as three engineers.
“We simply didn’t have the manpower to dedicate team members solely to maintaining, patching, and scheduling across the plethora of host pools,” commented Palmer. “But Nerdio Manager for Enterprise combines the sophisticated security protocols the bank needs with the customization and automation functionality necessary for my team to be effective with minimal Azure training.”
Additionally, the ease of use of the platform is a feature that has been immensely helpful not only to the engineering team, but also for the Help Desk and even those employees without a technical background.
“Access to the Nerdio platform has provided a wealth of knowledge and, as a result, has essentially made the Help Desk an extension of my team,” Palmer added. “Instead of having to wait about 30 minutes for an engineer, the Help Desk team can leverage Nerdio Manager to get a snapshot of the environment, quickly identify the issue, and triage with light engineering support over a Teams chat.”
In the future, when Palmer looks to expand the engineering team, the Help Desk employees have already been primed with half the necessary skills and can seamlessly transition into an engineering role.
Dollars and sense
Because of the visibility Nerdio Manager for Enterprise provides, Vanquis Bank has been able to optimize resources and cut costs, which is always top of mind for a financial institution. Palmer and the client engineering team can see when host pools are in use, identify trends in usage patterns, and ultimately determine what each virtual machine is costing the business.
“Nerdio helped us realize that the average user on a pooled machine runs the bank about $30 a month, while personal machines are costing us nearly twice as much,” recalled Palmer. “By having more visibility into consumption and usage, we’re able to make better decisions around optimizing the business.”
Additionally, the Cloud Operations Team has been able to leverage Azure dashboards to inform relevant changes across the Nerdio platform when it comes to sizing and efficiencies. Between the Auto-scaling feature and the customizations from the Cloud Operations Team, Vanquis Bank has reported monthly savings of nearly $64,000 (a 52% decrease).
“Now that we’ve been able to migrate away from our previous vendor and are experiencing the savings across Azure through Nerdio Manager for Enterprise, our stakeholders are going to be very happy,” Palmer said. “On top of that, the feedback from our end users after launch has been glowing. AVD is quicker, the experience is better, there are fewer crashes and technical issues, et cetera. But most importantly, they’re always connected and ready to serve our customer base.”
Continued support from Nerdio
While the technical capabilities and features of the platform have enabled Vanquis Bank to streamline IT and reduce spend, it’s the support from the Nerdio team that Palmer has found to be most valuable.
“I genuinely feel the Nerdio team is there to help us get the most out of the product,” Palmer raved. “It’s not often you encounter a vendor who gives clients so much attention or works harder to save you money across the board — not just as it relates to Nerdio’s specific domain. They truly want the best for their customers and customers’ end users.”
Beyond the day-to-day support, Nerdio prides itself on listening to customer feedback and implementing that input into the product.
“A few of my team members attended the Nerdio Customer Advisory meeting and came back gushing about the experience,” concluded Palmer. “They were excited to be able to discuss their actual experience with the technology, felt heard by the Nerdio team, and were eager to see the subsequent product improvements. This is the kind of experience I want from all of my vendors.”
To learn more about Vanquis Bank’s experience with AVD and Nerdio, download the full case study PDF below.
