Agency Systems deploys fully managed DaaS technology to improve customer experience

For the past 30 years, Agency Systems has been providing insurance agencies of all sizes with reliable, full-featured insurance agency management software solutions for commercial and personal lines, retail agencies, brokers, and general agencies.

Cloud Migration

In 2014, Agency Systems began their journey to adopt and embrace cloud-based technologies. Cloud migration began with rebuilding their on-premises data center on hosted cloud infrastructure. For application delivery, Agency Systems initially deployed a multi-tenant VDI solution in a shared Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) model.  Customers were able to access Agency Systems software (Newton) running on cloud-hosted virtual machines.

Moving to the cloud created spending efficiencies by shifting capital hardware expenditures to operational, pay-as-you-go expenses.  Without having to physically manage hardware infrastructure, IT administrators were able to focus on IT initiatives that were most strategic to the business.  While initial cost savings were substantial, the new cloud-based deployment was not meeting their requirements for data security, application performance, and application availability.

Challenges with initial VDI solution

With their initial cloud-based VDI deployment, Agency Systems felt the shared multi-tenant model was not meeting their application performance, security, and availability needs.  With multiple customers sharing the same resources, a few power users would degrade performance for other less demanding customers. Additionally, there were data privacy concerns with the multitenant architecture, and multiple security breaches within the industry. As serious malicious events were becoming more frequent and harder to defend, Agency Systems began to explore hosting alternatives for their VDI infrastructure.

Fully Managed DaaS from AWS

Today, Agency Systems has deployed a new, modern, and fully managed virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution with over 500 Amazon WorkSpaces.  Amazon WorkSpaces provides a dedicated, persistent, cloud-hosted desktop for each Agency Systems customer using their insurance management software.  With the Amazon WorkSpaces service, Agency Systems can provide access from both corporate issued and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) device types.  Since deploying Amazon WorkSpaces, Agency Systems has realized measurable gains in customer satisfaction, IT agility and cyber security.

Customer Satisfaction

Moving from a pooled multi-tenant VDI solution to a dedicated, persistent VDI solution with Amazon WorkSpaces has improved customer satisfaction for Agency Systems. Customers no longer have to compete for computing resources because they each have a dedicated cloud-hosted desktop.  With Amazon WorkSpaces, Agency Systems has seen improvements with application performance and response times. Providing each customer user with their own virtual desktop creates a highly available, high performing work experience compared with their initial deployment of multi-tenant virtual machines.

IT Agility

With Amazon WorkSpaces, Agency Systems was able to offload many of the management layers required with a self-managed, cloud-hosted, VDI solution (figure1).

(figure 1)

The “Fully Managed” Amazon WorkSpaces service has resulted in fewer IT support calls from customers experiencing application performance and availability issues.  Fewer support calls saves money, but also frees up IT resources to focus on more strategic initiatives.  Additionally, Agency Systems’ new deployment model provides security and customer isolation with a multi-account AWS Organization. Each customer environment is automatically deployed with a standardized architecture and an Amazon WorkSpaces base image. This lowers complexity, drift between environments, and reduces overhead on the IT desktop support team.

“With Amazon WorkSpaces, VDI software and infrastructure components are integrated into a single solution making it easy to provision and deploy new WorkSpaces as needed.  It used to take days to onboard new users, now we can do it minutes”, said Andy Ostermann, IT Director, Agency Systems. Agency Systems was able to strengthen their business continuity strategy using Amazon WorkSpaces. Users can access their Amazon WorkSpace from any device.  If the corporate issued device breaks, users can still access their WorkSpace from a secondary device.

Security

Agency Systems saw improved security with the transition to Amazon WorkSpaces.  Providing dedicated, cloud-hosted desktops for each user provides a secure workspace accessible only to the user.  With Amazon WorkSpaces, their organization data is not stored on end-user devices. Corporate data is secure at rest in the AWS Cloud, while all data in transit is automatically encrypted at the physical layer before leaving secured AWS facilities.

Partner Services

Agency Systems partnered with SoftwareOne for this initiative.  SoftwareOne set out to achieve three goals with Agency Systems.

1) Enable scaling of hundreds of customers and thousands of users with an improved architecture and automated deployment solution.

2) Pilot the solution with Agency Systems customers to validate the user experience and define effective migration plans.

3) Mobilize production operations and support for the solution with SoftwareOne’s managed services.

The end result was a success.  “Previously, VDI deployments were a multi-step manual process, subject to human error, and dependent on AWS engineering expertise.  Partnering with SoftwareOne and AWS, we can now deploy the AWS infrastructure, Active Directory users, and Amazon WorkSpaces for new customers with the simple submission of a secure web form.  We’re thrilled with the workflow improvements”, said Chance Martin, Senior Technical Support Engineer.

Moving Forward

With the significant increase in customer satisfaction, Agency Systems will continue to deploy new users on Amazon WorkSpaces while accelerating the redeployment of existing customers.  SoftwareOne will continue providing value-added services to streamline and automate the on-boarding, provisioning and scaling policies on behalf of Agency . You can learn more about getting started with Amazon WorkSpaces from the Amazon WorkSpaces administration guide.