Amazon WorkSpaces customers

Amazon WorkSpaces satisfies so many of our requirements. Using this solution, we can efficiently and cost-effectively provide more than 500 virtual desktops for our external collaborators.

We have a mix of contractors and temporary workers spread out globally, which created a network headache and brought up security concerns with deploying VPN to non-trusted devices and sending, configuring, and retrieving hardware to/from overseas. We assessed multiple cloud-based solutions, but decided to deploy WorkSpaces. We can customize WorkSpaces based on individual users' needs, and it is the best solution to easily scale for our enterprise applications. We have 10x more users on our WorkSpaces deployment than in our trial with the solution we compared it to, and are paying the same amount. The cost savings with WorkSpaces are a huge benefit. As WorkSpaces is an AWS service, it offers a better integration with other DocuSign networks and systems in place. Using AWS services, we fully automated WorkSpaces life cycle from auto-deployment to auto-decommissioning, thus reducing operational burden of managing WorkSpaces

Otter Products made the decision to virtualize its customer service work environment years ago. We tested VDI on-premises first and found it wasn’t cost effective, and required excessive labor and resources to operate. Otter Products worked with the AWS ProServ team to migrate 300 contact center agents onto Amazon WorkSpaces and are looking to expand deployments as their Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) environments matures. WorkSpaces is popular with our customer service agents because of its persistent nature vs an ephemeral VDI experience. WorkSpaces is a more reliable solution than traditional VDI, and its diverse clients will allow us to run it on a thin client, chrome book and/or  IGEL in the future. WorkSpaces has also made on-boarding quicker. We can stand up a WorkSpace in minutes for a new employee without incurring a large cost. One benefit we are starting to see as an international company is for global employees. Otter Products has remote users that prefer working on WorkSpaces to overcome local connectivity challenges. We enjoy the consistency of the WorkSpaces experience and plan on expanding with its capabilities.“ - Richard Sonnen, Director of IT Infrastructure & Operations at Otter Products

Being tech forward thinking makes us a bit of an outlier in our industry, but it has helped us grow our business tremendously. Amazon WorkSpaces was a game changer for us. It offered a better solution to deploy cloud desktops and move away from a cumbersome VPN with our partners in India. The solution has provided us a way to connect all of our systems while adhering to industry security standards as our secure data stays on our network instead of partners local devices.
 
We are a human capitol focused business. We operate multiple call centers with over 800 people to work with clients. Call centers are packed so we had to be ready to get people out of the when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Amazon WorkSpaces was perfect solution for enabling work from home and working with our clients remotely. We got 95% of our staff working from home in 13 days. We had hoped for 50% of our clients to take to the solution, however an overwhelming majority of our clients implemented the solution and in about 5 days we connected Amazon WorkSpaces to 9 different organizations systems flawlessly.

We had been operating with an on-premises solution for 17 years. As we moved to leverage third parties to aid in our servicing, we first piloted WorkSpaces to work with our partners securely. The pandemic accelerated our proof of concept, and we began using WorkSpaces on a large scale to provide 1,600 call center Agents greater flexibility to continue their work. We feel fortunate that we were able to get everyone who couldn't get back to the call center a WorkSpace, enabling them to continue operating efficiently and safely. With WorkSpaces, contact center employees can access a familiar windows environment with access to the applications and programs they were accustomed to. 
 
We noticed other global companies were facing challenges serving different geographical locations. Still, we maintained our ability to stream WorkSpaces and necessary applications to our global agents and business partners without issue. Our WorkSpaces users maintain access to the corporate network documents, which is beneficial for an agent while servicing a customer. If an agent wants to save a process, document or utilize Window’s functions they can still personalize their Workspaces windows experience. WorkSpaces has been fluid for us and today is our solution 100% for our partners, developers, and corporate users.

One of our major IT strategies at Acuity is to move to the cloud. The pandemic sped this process up and we were able to move 1800+ employees to a work from home environment using Amazon WorkSpaces. Maintaining business service continuity to our customers was our top priority without compromising the safety of our employees.  We operate using a BYOD strategy that allows analyst and developers to access applications like Reuters and Bloomberg, or connect to client devices securely with WorkSpaces. As the data does not live on the local device our developers and end users can operate from home as securely as we did from our 7 global operational centers

We needed to quickly develop and implement a work-from-home solution for 600 office-based contact center workers. The solution needed to support secure remote access from workers’ personal devices, in addition to company issued laptops. Extending Enova’s existing on-prem VPN to support new work from home users was ruled out quickly as an option, since it would not scale up time to meet this new business need.
 
Enova IT leveraged a single Amazon Linux image containing a softphone app and web browser to easily deploy WorkSpaces to its 600 contact center workers in 1 week. The WorkSpaces solution also enabled workers to access Genesys with their personal devices to reduce the number of company laptops to be purchased and provisioned. “Enova leadership credits Amazon WorkSpaces as a major reason for our company’s resiliency during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our IT team’s ability to quickly respond by rolling out a new work-from-home solution based on WorkSpaces resulted in no interruption to our contact center operations.

Ferrellgas needed to move quickly to provide a remote desktop environment for corporate office users. Additionally, due to COVID lockdowns in municipalities across the country, there was a need to provide Customer Service employees the ability to work from home. The technology team easily scaled-up our existing WorkSpaces environment to support over 250 new corporate and customer support users in a month. Many of our employees reside in rural areas with low bandwidth internet connectivity but we were still able to enable access to ERP, contact center, mapping, and productivity applications. As a result, our remote users have experienced application speeds of up to 85% faster than traditional VPN access. In many cases this has provided a boost in user productivity and satisfaction.

Our company had nearly quadrupled in size and the on-premises VDI solution was not able to grow with us and we were unable to spin up enough instances as quickly as we needed. We worked with our strategic partner Involta to deploy Amazon WorkSpaces as our new solution. With Amazon WorkSpaces we are able to support our continued growth, ensure business continuity during a pandemic and save on capital expenditures to expand an on-premises solution. We have now seen a significant decrease in direct link and VPN redundancies and are utilizing zero clients that require less repair and maintenance than traditional desktops and laptops. We were not expecting to be in the midst of a pandemic. With Involta’s support and Amazon WorkSpaces, we were able to migrate to a remote work model in 48 hours and still maintain access to all standard business suite applications, EHR, and revenue cycle software platforms and work with our clients systems.

We were struggling with an inconsistent and slow solution that was difficult to manage. We began working with Privo to migrate to Amazon WorkSpaces and our employees can now access their full suite of applications on zero client devices, Chromebooks, and traditional PCs. Being in an industry with seasonal and contractor employees, we needed to be able to scale quickly and easily. We can provision an employee a WorkSpace in as quickly as 15 minutes and even define what these employees have access to in their WorkSpace. Having all the data stored in a VPC keeps data secure and off of their local device. Working with Privo has allowed us to utilize services like Amazon WorkSpaces move faster and more securely.

Our legacy VDI solution had issues we could not continue forward with, for example if one user had high CPU usage it would take the server down for everybody. We were deciding between purchasing all new on premises hardware or moving to Amazon WorkSpaces. We decided to use WorkSpaces because of its ease of deployment and ease of onboarding new employees. We worked with an APN partner, Innovative, and they helped us get set up with WorkSpaces and are our ongoing support team. After implementing Amazon WorkSpaces we have seen onboarding time go down from hours to 10-15 minutes. Some of the applications we use on WorkSpaces are Microsoft Office, Sage Estimating, and Sage Accounting. We have employees at up to 20 different sites at a time and one of the advantages of WorkSpaces is that it can support all those employees, and if one employee needs more CPU they can do that without bringing down the system. Amazon WorkSpaces has become our default solution across the company, we don’t even have the need for VPN anymore, everyone in our company has a WorkSpace by default.

With Windows 7 approaching end of life and our aging end-user equipment, we needed a solution. Amazon Workspaces allowed us to replace our entire fleet of laptops and desktops in a matter of weeks. Privo and AWS helped us reduce our onboarding time by 90% and our overall operational costs by 30%. Not only are we seeing cost savings, our security profile has never been better. Encrypted, Scalable and Easily Managed. None of this was as straightforward and achievable until we moved to Amazon Workspaces.

We moved to WorkSpaces because we were looking for a secure way for users to access our AWS Data Lake Environment while providing them with a high-quality user experience. We use Amazon WorkSpaces as a gateway to utilize BI applications querying and reporting against our data lake and other AWS environments. With WorkSpaces our users can securely access various data sources and we can control who we give access to and what tools and level of access each user gets. We have provisioned several hundred WorkSpaces and have recognized benefits that the WorkSpaces technology provides such as flexibility, scalability and secure access.

Over the last year we have been building on AWS which has improved our flexibility, scalability, and reliability. However, we needed a way to increase security for production workloads — as one measure to further limit administrative access, we chose to employ hardened bastion hosts. While working in our own data centers, we would normally rely on a single server running Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS). This model changed when we moved to AWS as we could move towards a dynamic desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) solution. Amazon WorkSpaces offered several benefits over a traditional monolithic model.

To start, pay-as-you-go pricing. Purchasing large windows servers to support dozens of RDP sessions would have been too expensive to run constantly when our staff aren't always logged in. And, because Amazon WorkSpaces is a managed service, it handles many of the cumbersome processes associated with Windows servers and RDP. We can start and shut down WorkSpaces in a single click, re-provision a WorkSpace to a known good bundle at any time, and multi-factor authentication worked out of the box. All of this lowers the attack surface for our administrative bastion hosts and expedites maintenance schedules.

Digiturk started using WorkSpaces in 2017. We needed a way to allow our remote workers from multiple locations within 8 different countries to securely access Windows Form applications. Since these applications contain business sensitive data, we needed to ensure data does not leave our Amazon Virtual Private Network (VPC). We evaluated VDI options however Amazon WorkSpaces offered unmatched cost, performance and security advantages. WorkSpaces eliminated the complexity in managing hardware inventory, OS versions and patches, which allowed us to save hundreds of engineering hours yearly.

Our company runs a cloud only and platform first strategy. By working with AWS partner Axcess IO' we were able to combine Amazon WorkSpaces, Directory Services and FSx for Windows File Server and we have created a Platform-as-a-Service Solution. Our two requirements were to implement a remote workforce and secure access to our production data in the AWS Cloud. The cloud only strategy eliminated the complexity of a Hybrid cloud solution and connecting to Amazon FSx for Windows File Server from Amazon WorkSpaces provided a smooth transition from on premises to the AWS Cloud with fast, secure shared storage to thousands of legal professionals. We saw increased reliability and scalability, with no disruption to our applications or production data (file and SQL Server). We no longer worry about protecting file data on individual laptops.