World’s largest restaurant chain makes a seamless and efficient transition to a work-from-home environment

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, Long View’s partnership with one of the world’s largest restaurant chains enabled the iconic brand to make a seamless and efficient transition to a work-from-home environment

When Long View helped an iconic worldwide restaurant chain to make the transition to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform in 2018, the project’s success extended well beyond the technology. Together, the two organizations built a strong and trusted relationship that became the cornerstone of a long-term partnership.

In late April 2020, with the enactment of the COVID-19 quarantine measures the chain’s CTO once again looked to their partnership with Long View to help them make the transition to a work-from-home environment.

As part of a global initiative, the move to a secure, remote working environment using a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) was essential to meeting the ongoing demands of a large publicly traded corporation – including the ability to closeout a pending quarter on-time.

By scaling up the current infrastructure (including licensing) to support 700 remote users in less than 36 hours, the client was able to seamlessly transition its workforce with no interruption in workflow capability and system performance.

Long View’s ongoing commitment to investing in relationships with clients to understand their unique challenges and implement the right solutions at the right time is the key to success both now and in the future.

 

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SUMMARY

 

Business Challenges

• As the COVID-19 situation became a reality, workers globally needed to make the transition from an office location to working from home using a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology through a secure system connection.
• As a large, publicly-traded company that had never missed a quarterly closeout, the client had an urgent need to establish secure remote access for their finance function. A technology issue is not an acceptable reason for non-compliance.

Response

• The Long View team took the initiative to scale up the environment quickly by 700 users in less than 36 hours, as well as add more as needed on a timely basis – including managing the licensing requirements.
• The client’s system architecture was also scaled up to support the dramatic increase in the remote workforce with virtually no performance degradation.
• Through proactive communication between Long View and its client partner system performance and capacity were monitored on an ongoing basis. In addition to monitoring a dependency plan was “prepared” ahead of time to address critical areas including the confirmation of sufficient IP addresses, a large enough VMS, firewalls, subnets, and more.
• As the Citrix environment was “hosted” in Azure - which Long View currently does not manage, it was important for the team to understand with whom they should directly work to ensure that needed changes would be made on a timely basis.
• An extensive As-Built project document was prepared and reviewed for easy reference.
• The coordination of resources and the corresponding mobilization of the partnership for this massive undertaking was the key to the successful transition from an in-office to work-from-home environment.

Solutions Used

• Implemented Citrix server hosted in the cloud on Azure.
• Using Citrix, the client was able to quickly and reliably scale-up virtual desktops enabling their many contractors around the world to access their core system securely.

Customer Impact

• The large-scale transition to a remote workforce environment was efficient and seamless.
• The client was able to comply with regulatory requirements, successfully closing out the quarter.