A company that delivers financial software and services to the healthcare industry (the “Company”) moved from a Citrix environment to Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). However, AVD management was laborious, and scaling issues abounded. The Company Director responsible for the environment began exploring Nerdio for AVD management, beginning with a proof of concept. “We found it to be a lot easier to manage,” he said. “The team at the time was small, so we were bandwidth-limited. With Nerdio, however, we could have a small team managing AVD.”
Nerdio provided immediate benefits in scalability, ease of deployment, and end-user experience. The Director’s AVD engineers offered high praise. “They definitely loved it,” he stated. “I got from my team that it made life so much easier to manage imaging, deployment, and scaling.”
The system’s abilities were put to the test when a merger/acquisition required migrating more than 15,000 users from Citrix to AVD to join the Company’s existing 1,000 users. The Director found that Nerdio significantly streamlined the process. “That was one of the company’s biggest accomplishments in 2023,” he said. “I think part of the accomplishment is also how we continue to support those 16,000 users in addition to the 4,000 added just this year. It continues to grow.”
Quantifiable savings
Fewer than 20 employees are needed to support the Company’s 20,000 users. The Director estimates that Nerdio’s automation and scaling capabilities save 3 to 4 additional FTEs—a 20% savings on FTE costs. Additional savings include onboarding costs, which fell from $60 per month per employee to $40.
Compute costs have also fallen since the Company gained the ability to scale up and down and manage different volumes of users each month. “When systems are no longer being utilized,” the Director explained, “we can shut them down, even though we have reservations and quotas enabled. Shutting down systems reduces compute costs, which are the highest cost outside of storage. Nerdio helps us reduce those costs at scale. We would have to add additional engineers to manually handle that.”
Finally, image deployment automation reduces costs even further. The Director estimates 30-40% savings per user. “We hand off and do the image updates and other tasks automatically through Nerdio.”
The Director can be sure of savings because he monitors costs within Nerdio. “We see costs within the dashboard,” he clarified. “In the Nerdio dashboard, there are actually metrics that show how much we’re saving. For instance, we’re seeing overall savings from auto-scaling at 55%.”
This is particularly valuable when justifying infrastructure costs. “I actually did a whole walkthrough with our CFO,” the Director recalled. “I showed how we manage our desktop images and how we go about creating workspaces. I could show the speed and efficiency of it from a team perspective. I could show that if we didn’t have Nerdio, we’d need at least three or four additional heads, while onboarding, scaling, and management would take longer.”
A commitment to maximizing value
To help ensure the Company gets the best from its AVD environment, Nerdio hosts monthly customer engagement meetings to review best practices, any outstanding or anticipated issues, or features the Company would like to see added to the system to better meet their needs.
“They are excellent,” the Director said of the meetings. “I have all my lead engineers on the calls. They can ask any questions they have or discuss some lower-priority items that we want to target. ‘What do we need to do to do this? Is this the best practice? Does this make sense? Should we be using this or not using this?’ The meetings help with all of it. Working with Nerdio is like having consultants we can always go to.”
Ready to see how Nerdio can save your organization on compute costs, onboarding, and beyond? Book a demo today!