In the context of digital transformation in the public administration, the GISS has managed to deploy a solid remote work platform that saves time and prevents duplication. Security and mobility are essential elements of this platform.
INDUSTRY
Public Administrations
CHALLENGE
To urgently deploy a solution that enabled employees of the Social Security service to work remotely, and to keep supporting citizens within the emergency situation caused by COVID-19.
SOLUTION
- Acropolis
- Prism
- Files
- Flow
The whole process was completed within two weeks. It started with a temporary platform ready for 300 users on the first day of deployment; 15 days later, the solution was available to 3,000 users.
CHALLENGES
The IT Department of the Social Security (GISS) is a common service for the management and administration of IT and communication in the Social Security system, which depends on the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, and is affiliated to the Secretary of State for Social Security and Pensions at the rank of Subdirectorate General. Among its main functions are the elaboration and proposal of management plans for IT and telecommunications systems to the managing entities: General Social Security Treasury, and Office of the Comptroller General of the Social Security.
In the face of the emergency situation caused by COVID-19 in March 2020, the GISS needed to urgently deploy a solution which allowed the Social Security employees to work remotely and keep supporting the citizens.
The GISS has a Department of Innovation that evaluates existing technologies, and works with the Production and Systems department to identify the areas where new technologies may add value to the organization. To this end, during the months leading up to the outbreak of the pandemic, different infrastructure and solution options were evaluated. GISS was already using virtual desktops in some areas, although it still hadn’t considered the extension of remote work throughout the entire organiza-tion. In order to improve some tasks, they were evaluating different infrastructure options and virtual desktop and application solutions. This need accelerated with the outbreak of the pandemic.
SOLUTION
In response to this situation, the GISS opted for Nutanix technology, which offered enough flexibility to deploy the new infrastructure in a short period of time, which was essential given the urgency of the situation.
The previous knowledge they had about the components of the Nutanix+Citrix solution facilitated the choice and the decision-making process for rapid response and deployment. The whole process was completed within two weeks. It started with a temporary platform ready for 300 users on the first day of deployment; 15 days later, the solution was available to 3,000 users.
When considering the most suitable components to carry out the project, they decided on a solution that allowed an agile deployment of the different services required by the GISS so that its employees could work remotely. It consisted of the Acropolis hypervisor, the core of the whole multicloud solution, which allows for a distributed platform and is designed to handle any failures; Nutanix Prism, for the workload management and end-to-end operations in the platform; Nutanix Files, to have a software-defined file service; and Flow, for microsegmentation and security for desktops and VM.
The deployment wouldn’t have been possible without the feedback and commitment of the GISS’s technical team, whose staff worked for 24 hours to provide the remote work posts needed for the Social Security managing entities so that they could pursue its activities, despite the lockdown situation.
Besides Nutanix, which implemented the private cloud, other technological partners took part in the deployment of the project: Lenovo, supplied the hardware infrastructure in record time; Citrix, used the private cloud to deploy virtual desktops; and Telefónica and Einzelnet, who handled the integration and operation of the complete solution.
BENEFITS
In the context of digital transformation in the public administration, the deployment of virtual desktops offers significant benefits for the transformation of the workplace, where security and mobility are key elements. In this way, the public administration opened the door to a remote work model, which is now becoming consolidated.
The deployment based on a hyperconverged infrastructure has demonstrated its efficiency both time- and resource-wise, meeting both deadlines and expectations. The unification of the monitoring of the whole infrastructure has allowed GISS to save time, avoid duplication, and break down existing information silos by consolidating different services of the same platform. What’s more, the GISS’s technical team has learned to operate the solution quickly and efficiently.
The solution deployed at the GISS assures both mobility and cybersecurity, with excellent usability and management effort. The deployment, carried out initially on a hybrid cloud and later migrated to a private cloud, has allowed them to verify on their own the flexibility of the cloud solutions in all of its facets, which provides an essential element in the processes of digital transformation currently going on: the fast deployment of efficient and safe solutions.