By Pupul Dutta
When HDFC Life, a leading insurance company, decided to do away with legacy infrastructure, it faced a series of problems. To begin with, the company had the challenge of maintaining and providing support to the ageing computers. Secondly, there was a spurt in mobile devices and the company wanted to capitalise on this trend by offering services through mobiles and tablets. That’s when HDFC Life felt that it should consider desktop virtualisation for its IT needs.
“We did not want to get bogged down by the constraint of servicing our customers only through branches. With the proliferation of high-powered tablets and mobiles and improvement in connectivity, we wanted a solution that could complement this trend,” says Thomson Thomas, Senior Vice President – IT (Head – Business Systems and Technology), HDFC Life.
Besides the problem of ageing infrastructure, HDFC Life also wanted to overcome the challenge of information security. It had become a problem for the IT department to enforce security in the conventional IT desktop environment.
Thomas says that even though the company had control over what one could download and store on one’s PC, it was still a challenge for IT as far as security was concerned. “Therefore, we wanted to eliminate the hard disc and storage at the branches,” he adds.
While the cost of deploying virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) was not lower than that of new desktops, Thomas took the long term view and went ahead with VDI, as he wanted to deploy a technology that would enable HDFC Life to scale up.
HDFC connected all its 360 branches through multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), linked to the back-end hosted in Mumbai. The sales staff had to access applications through PCs at the branches. In all, the company had around 7,000 workstations.
The solution
HDFC evaluated several solutions before zeroing in on Citrix’s XenDesktop. Thomas, who had previously used Citrix solutions, was very positive about working with the company again.
He felt that the biggest advantage with Citrix was that it had an entire suite of platform and software to enable any level of virtualisation. “Citrix offers XenDesktop for end point virtualisation, XenServer for server virtualisation and XenApp for consolidating applications,” Thomas asserts.
“Besides, the Citrix platform is light on the network and easy to deploy. It gave us an edge by letting us go to any extent of virtualisation with the same partner,” says Thomas.
For the proof of concept (PoC), Thomas picked up a mix of locations. “We did a PoC of 30 thin clients across 10 locations. The PoC ran for over a month and provided us important feedback on the benefits and robustness of the solution,” he says.
Post the PoC and the positive feedback from the end users, HDFC Life went ahead with the first phase of deployment of Citrix XenDesktop, rolling out 1,000 Citrix XenDesktop terminals at 50 locations.
Thomas says that the speed at which the user could access applications was phenomenally better than that in the desktop environment. “This gave us the confidence to go in for the next phase with more branches and more functions,” adds Thomas.
The company went live in less than a month. “We only had to upgrade certain network switches to cater to the increase in traffic that the VDI solution would bring. Given the solution works well on standard Intel boxes, this does away with the need for upgrades,” he says.
The VDI solution, which has been deployed for the sales function, is being considered by HDFC Life for other applications as well.
“While Citrix XenDesktop was initially deployed for the sales function, after witnessing the host of benefits, HDFC Life has decided that the desktops of other functions such as training and operations would also be replaced with the VDI platform,” says Nilesh Goradia, Head – Pre-sales, India Subcontinent, Citrix.
Benefits galore
The deployment of Citrix XenDesktop has yielded a host of benefits for HDFC Life. One key benefit has been the ease of manageability for the IT team. “They can now quickly roll out, clean up and manage anti-virus patches and software updates. Managing the computing devices itself has become easy,” says Thomas.
With the management of devices now happening centrally, the security risk has been minimised. Most applications can now be accessed faster, as they don’t run on a local PC. Since it is a virtual session, there are not too many offline software open on the end-user devices. Hence, there is improvement in the feed of the applications that are used by the sales force.
By providing lean devices, the solution has helped save space and has resulted in fewer terminals. “Even though there are only 2,000 thin clients, we have a coverage ratio of 1:3. The sales force moves out in the field and comes back in the evening for uploads. They don’t need dedicated terminals,” says Thomas.
HDFC Life plans to extend the technology to tablets and mobile devices. “When we kick off our initiatives on the mobile front, we would be using the Citrix platform to enable our employees to access applications,” says Thomas.
In addition, the total cost of ownership too has come down considerably, with operational efficiency improving at the same time. According to Goradia of Citrix, “Since thin clients are 90% more power efficient than desktops, in case of remote areas where there is no electricity for longer durations, they are very useful. It also promotes green computing.”