ConTe.it Reduces Costs by 50% and Improves User Experience Using Amazon WorkSpaces Secure Browser

As a member of the Admiral Group, ConTe.it offers car, moto and pet insurance to more than 1 million Italian customers. Customer service agents handle everything from helping onboard new customers and processing renewals to providing post-sales support. As ConTe.it looked toward the future, it realized that it needed to address issues associated with its self-managed VDI solution, which was costly to operate and time-consuming to maintain.

After evaluating user workflows and testing several services, ConTe.it learned that many agents only required access to web-based internal applications in order to support their use case, and recognized an opportunity to simplify. They selected WorkSpaces Secure Browser for its predictable and cost-effective pricing model, seamless integration with multi-factor authentication (MFA), and the availability of large instance sizes for resource-intensive workloads.

During migration planning, ConTe.it identified several personas to include in a phased migration, starting with users with basic sales workflows. After the organization confirmed that these users’ applications could be delivered through a web browser, it began the full migration. Over 3 months, ConTe.it Technology Domain migrated all the agents from the previous self-managed VDI system to WorkSpaces Secure Browser. Throughout the deployment process, ConTe.it worked closely alongside the AWS End User Computing team to beta test new instance types, including large instance types that provide secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, like the ConTe.it VoIP system. “WorkSpaces Secure Browser was simple to deploy and configure, and it automatically scales with demand,” says Francesco De Nardi, DevOps Cloud Architect at ConTe.it. “This minimized operational overhead, so our team could focus on maximizing the return on investment.”

ConTe.it deployed WorkSpaces Secure Browser to 300 remote users in less than 3 months. Now, agents can access all their applications securely on organization-owned devices. “The flexibility and scalability of WorkSpaces Secure Browser is extremely important. If we need to distribute our products or offer new ones in the future, we can confidently use the service for the new agents,” says Andrea Cova, Chief Technology Officer at ConTe.it.

It’s simple for ConTe.it to make changes and customize WorkSpaces Secure Browser. For example, onboarding new users was a complex process with many potential failure points. Now, using WorkSpaces Secure Browser, it is possible to easily onboard new users when needed by adding them to their SAML 2.0 identity provider. This identity provider is federated with WorkSpaces Secure Browser, so users automatically inherit access with single sign-on. “It only takes a few clicks to start working on WorkSpaces Secure Browser,” says Cova. This change has greatly reduced the IT workload, so engineers can focus on more-impactful projects. “We’ve removed repetitive activity so that we can instead work on financial operations and other high-value tasks,” says Cova.

ConTe.it estimates that it reduced costs by up to 50 percent with WorkSpaces Secure Browser compared with its previous VDI solution. “There’s a clear pricing model for WorkSpaces Secure Browser, so we can monitor costs and share them with the team leaders who manage the operations area” says Cova. Thanks to this migration, ConTe.it has also improved its security and governance by using MFA and single-sign-on capabilities. Previously, users had to log in to the VDI system, and again for each application. Using WorkSpaces Secure browser, ConTe.it configured a single-sign-on extension for Amazon WorkSpaces to simplify the login process while maintaining strong security by verifying identities using MFA. Now, employees are prompted for only their usernames, passwords, and MFA before they start a secure browser session. Then, websites in the browser inherit the sign-on, so users can access all the tools in the organization’s environment. “Because WorkSpaces Secure Browser can connect to third-party providers, we can control access to it and verify the authenticity of access through MFA,” says De Nardi.

ConTe.it is supporting its workforce with a simpler, more secure, and more reliable remote access system under the AWS Shared Responsibility Model. “WorkSpaces Secure Browser has been a valuable tool from the beginning, and the collaboration and synergy between ConTe.it and the AWS team have been very important,” says Cova.

Now, ConTe.it is focusing on investing its IT resources in high-value activities, such as its financial operations systems and further improving the customer experience. Most applications are now available through WorkSpaces Secure Browser, and ConTe.it is refactoring the few remaining ones to work with the service so that it can obtain further cost savings.

The organization’s remote employees are happy with the change. “Our agents have completely forgotten about the old tool because WorkSpaces Secure Browser is so much simpler to use,” says De Nardi.