Client Spotlight
Ashford and St. Peter’s Hospitals National Health Service Foundation Trust provides acute hospital services in Surrey, England. The Trust employs around 4,400 staff.A Brief Summary
Concorde implemented Windows Virtual Desktop, a remote desktop and application virtualisation solution, enabling the Trust’s employees to work remotely using personal devices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We went with Windows Virtual Desktop to solve our immediate need to quickly enable hundreds of employees to work remotely. We’re staying with it…”
The Situation
Ashford and St. Peter’s Hospitals National Health Service Foundation Trust provides acute hospital services in Surrey, England. The Trust employs around 4,400 staff, and is the largest provider of acute hospital services to Surrey residents, serving more than 410,000 people.
In late February 2020, it became clear that 343 employees would need to start working remotely as soon as possible because of COVID-19. This was especially critical for employees who spent all day in enclosed offices together, such as the Payroll department.
The Trust also had to relocate its services to handle the crisis. As St. Peter’s Hospital started taking COVID-19 and emergency patients, elective services were moved to Ashford Hospital and other community-based locations, where the Trust set up additional mobile CT scanners and MRI units.
Our Solution
The Trust chose to implement Windows Virtual Desktop, a remote desktop and application virtualisation solution. With this solution, the Trust could simplify IT management and run Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session - providing access to staff no matter where they had to work.
It took less than four weeks from the Trust’s initial phone call to Concorde Technology Group for the solution to be initially deployed. “It was much faster than procuring, configuring, and distributing new laptops to staff,” comments Morné Beck, Head of IT at the Trust. “The number of employees who need to work from home grows every day, but the solution is fully scalable, so we’ll be ready.”
The Trust uses Microsoft Defender Antivirus and two-factor authentication for Windows Virtual Desktop, which are included with Windows Virtual Desktop.
Employee training was quick and straightforward. As users apply for access to Windows Virtual Desktop, they receive instructional documentation, provided by Concorde and customised by the Trust’s staff, to use the solution.
Customer's Opinion
Within just a few weeks, the employees were working remotely using personal devices, and the Trust saved approximately £340,000 on hardware and £3,500 on software costs that it would have had to spend to deploy additional laptops, along with 80 percent of the IT time needed to manually configure and apply security updates to company-managed laptops.
Morné summarizes, “We went with Windows Virtual Desktop to solve our immediate need to quickly enable hundreds of employees to work remotely. We’re staying with it for the built-in management and security—which saves us time when granting access to other healthcare organizations and applying security updates. It also reduces ongoing hardware costs. Now our money can be better spent on patient care.”
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