Automating Virtual Workloads at Scale

Enhancing operations and reliability at a leading global financial services institution, with Cloudsoft AMP.

The enterprise solutions group of a prominent global financial institution is tasked with managing the firm's workspace platform, delivering virtual applications and desktops to a vast user base over 250,000 individuals. Striving to achieve greater operational efficiency, enhanced reliability, and increased agility, the group has successfully leveraged Cloudsoft AMP to streamline their operations and overcome significant challenges in their virtual desktop infrastructure.

Challenges

1) System Reliability and Performance

Detecting potential issues early, and auto-remediating to ensure smooth system operations and deliver consistent user experiences.

2) Cyber Incident Recovery

Establishing a rapid and effective mechanism to recover from cyber incidents, including a comprehensive "repave" process.

3) Upgrades and Improvements

Rolling out upgrades and improvements seamlessly while maintaining version control and tracking.

Solution and Benefits

Cloudsoft AMP emerged as a transformative solution for the enterprise solutions group, comprehensively addressing these challenges and enabling the team to achieve their desired outcomes, and more:

1) Automated Upgrades and Elimination of Toil

AMP can fully automate routine tasks like "HTML5 Client" upgrades. Prior to AMP, these upgrades required pulling specific components across each of the 50 sites under the groups' management and then upgrading in batches to ensure they weren't taken out of operation concurrently. AMP streamlined this process, which previously required days of effort, into a process which could be executed with a simple click and which required little to no human oversight. As a result, operator errors were drastically reduced, and progress tracking and scheduling were enhanced, demonstrating a substantial improvement in operational efficiency.

Learn more about reducing toil.

2) Intelligent Automation with Dynamic Policies

Integrating AMP with critical monitoring sources, CMDB, and workflow tools, the group harnessed dynamic policies to trigger effectors based on specific conditions. This integration enabled precise automation, such as restarting services upon load threshold breaches. These intelligent policies became an integral part of blueprints, automating actions and significantly reducing manual intervention.

3) Operational Efficiency and Satisfying Regulatory Requirements

Cloudsoft AMP's effectors played a pivotal role in simplifying complex operational tasks, significantly reducing operator errors and saving time; such as "repaving" specific data centers whilst adhering to concurrency limits. Such efficient batching allowed tasks to be completed swiftly and enabled seamless resumption in case of interruptions, contrasting with the laborious and error-prone alternative.

4) Structured Model for Holistic Management

AMP's structured model provided a foundation for the firm to efficiently organise services, resources, and dependencies. The team integrated their operational systems and tools, modeling individual components (which can be grouped), as well as entire applications. This makes automation safe and easy to produce, and via Infrastructure-as-Code templates, easily reproducible. Because AMP is integrated with all the relevant tools, the models are enriched by context from many sources enabling real-time, full visibility of the state of the workload under management.

Leveraging this model, the team could track activities within specific sites and regions, ensuring early detection of potential outages. For instance, AMP's dynamic groups and structured approach alerted the team to a potential crisis when certain regions were inadvertently taken offline during the pandemic.

Next steps

Want to learn more about Cloudsoft AMP? Head to www.cloudsoft.io/software.