When your organization is dedicated to providing clean water
and hygiene, health care, and education to disadvantaged communities around the
globe, you don't let little things like time zones and language barriers stand
in your way. On the other hand, not being able to exchange email and files
dependably with your employees around the world is a big problem. When
Oakland-based international development organization East Meets West realized
most of its employees were using personal email accounts to work around its
unreliable hosted Outlook and Citrix solutions, it turned to Xantrion for an
alternative.
In evaluating the organization's existing infrastructure,
Xantrion engineer Jeremy Davis discovered the cause of the slow logins,
frequent crashes, and long lag times bogging it down. The hosted applications
were several updates behind — and more critically, were on an over utilized
shared server architecture.
Davis set up Xantrion’s Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution
to rectify the situation. He set up a new infrastructure for the nonprofit in
Xantrion's Denver colocation facility, then replaced all the aging desktops in
its Oakland headquarters with thin clients, or “dumb” terminals, running
Citrix. To ensure overseas users in countries like Myanmar and Cambodia have
the same experience as their US counterparts, he remotely installed and
configured DaaS for those who speak English and walked local IT pros through
the installation process in other languages.
The nonprofit began using its Xantrion Desktop-as-a-Service
(DaaS) solution on June 1, and corporate controller Burt Thompson reports that
the service and support are both exceeding expectations.
"Our CFO was recently traveling through China, and the
connection was wonderful wherever he went, even in remote locations with
minimal bandwidth," Thompson says. "We're able to give network access
to employees who previously couldn't even do simple things like log on to check
email. Now that we have a more reliable system, we can spend less time trying
to work around inefficiencies and more time doing positive things with
IT."
