Microsoft and Embee Empower Aegon Life Insurance Company to Simplify its IT Processes, Optimize Costs, and Enhance Security with Virtual Desktop Interface on Microsoft Azure

4 Nov, 2019 | Embee

This customer success story was originally published on Microsoft’s customer stories portal.

Products and Services

Azure

Industry

Insurance

Organization Size

Large (1,000 – 9,999 employees)

Country

India

About customer

Aegon Life Insurance is on the leading edge of the Indian financial services and insurance industry’s digital transformation. To truly become a digital-first, digital-driven, and at times digital-only business, Aegon Life needed to connect a dispersed workforce by combining its cloud infrastructure with user-level devices.

Business challenge

Aegon Life Insurance Company was envisioning a long-term, modern IT strategy to connect the dots between its cloud infrastructure and devices at the user level. Multiple user-level desktop computers needed to be refreshed, and they were loaded with business applications requiring machine-level access. This stretched the bandwidth of the IT administrative staff and created a lot of dependency on manual maintenance of security patches and antivirus updates. Additionally, the data was stored natively on the machines, which posed a high risk around recovery and a challenge for centralized control.

“Circulation of timely information in a secure manner, through an infrastructure that’s future-ready, was core to our IT modernization strategy. Our primary focus was to ensure our employees are not getting hampered with the traditional technology setup, which in turn has a direct impact on customer serviceability and business profits,” says Ramashre Vishwakarma, deputy vice president, IT, at Aegon Life.

Solution

When deciding on its solution infrastructure, Aegon Life focused on a virtual desktop interface (VDI) with application virtualization. It turned to Remote Desktop Services (RDS) and apps hosted on Microsoft Azure. It later engaged Embee Software, a Microsoft Gold partner for infrastructure modernization and cloud migration, to build the VDI base setup on Azure. The setup comprised of various Azure resources, like virtual machines, network load balancing, Azure Blob Storage, ExpressRoute gateway, and multifactor authentication (MFA) services.

To allow user profile storage in a centralized hub on the cloud, RDS included User Profile Disks. And the VDI setup on Azure was high availability, with MPLS connectivity to the primary datacenter of Aegon Life, helping to increase seamless access of core and intranet applications from Azure. MFA services from Azure were further integrated to allow users to connect RDS applications from the intranet.

Aegon Life was able to achieve an agile ramp-up with no up-front capital expenditure by taking advantage of the on-demand scalability of Microsoft Azure, which offered speedy deployment and pay by usage.

“Our customers’ business needs ranged from productivity to security to accessibility. To address them in the most cost-effective manner, we architected a unique solution under a single umbrella. We created a unified remote desktop experience by using the Azure platform where the employees could rapidly deploy a cost-effective, redundant, and scalable platform to host Windows desktops and applications,” says Krishna Sai, CTO at Embee Software.

For uninterrupted and secure access, additional security controls were enabled on Windows RDS via Azure Active Directory, alongside a segregated load buffer for intranet and internet networks. Users were then able to log in and access the RDS and remote applications seamlessly through Windows 10–based thin client kiosks. Thin clients are also installed in users’ Windows 10 laptops, through which they can access the apps remotely from anywhere.

Reach us out at marketing@embee.co.in and stand a chance to avail a free, customized digital transformation workshop worth $3000 for your business.

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