Leading digital & engineering services company moves to CVAD
Onward Technologies Ltd. is a niche Digital & Engineering Services company offering a wide spectrum of services ranging from Digital Transformation, Mechanical Engineering, Electronics & Embedded Systems Development, Data Analytics services. Headquartered in Mumbai, the company was established in 1991. It’s over 2,100 strong workforce across India, US, UK and Europe caters to customers from multiple industry domains, including automotive, rail transportation, industrial, healthcare & medical devices among others.
Onward Technologies is a trusted technology partner for Engineering & Design (ER&D) and digital innovation for Global 2000 companies. Its clients depend on it to execute on their digital and business transformation vision. With the help of Citrix Virtual Application and Desktop (CVAD), the company has been able to ensure uninterrupted delivery to its clients despite the lock down owing to the COVID-19 pandemic.
As the employees were forced to work from home (WFH), the #1 priority for Sidarth Revoo, Vice President – Delivery, Onward Technologies Ltd. was to ensure that employees are able to continue working from home seamlessly and be able to deliver on all client project commitments on time with no compromise on data security and management.
“We needed to immediately get our employees to WFH and that required giving them remote access to their desktops and the applications in a secure manner,” says Sidarth.
The company had tried simple firewall-based remote desktop extension in the past for remote log-in for IT team to do controls and management over weekends and some offline support. However, this was not conducive in the current situation considering the high work volumes and the strong graphics support required for the production work on the design floor.
“Being an engineering design firm, we use several design tools and require effective graphic support. Any delay or lag while accessing these design applications can spoil the whole work experience and productivity of the employees,” explains Sidarth.
While bandwidth availability is one of the factors determining the quality of experience, it was critical to have the right remote access tool to really optimize the whole work experience for the employees.
But all this can come to a naught if security fails. With some of the leading businesses as its customers, it was non-negotiable for Onward team that any remote access extended to the employees should not compromise on data security.
According to Sidarth, “With CVAD we were looking for the capability to adapt to the new paradigm of work, which is built on the key pillars of flexibility, productivity and security.”
As Onward team evaluated the various solutions in the market, they were particularly impressed with CVAD’s ability to deliver on all the key pillars. The robust security with built-in controls supplemented with strong screen refresh for a superior graphics experience provided just the right balance of security and productivity. The comparatively lower bandwidth requirement of the Citrix solution was an added bonus.
“We started using CVAD on a trial basis and saw our employees getting a seamless work experience even from home. That’s when we decided that this is the right solution to help us execute our jobs,” adds Sidarth.
With time at a premium, the fast turnaround from the teams at Citrix and their implementation partner, Vintech, helped Onward Technologies go live with CVAD within a week. Thus, ensuring that the workforce could quickly get started with WFH home without any delays.
Accessibility with Secure Controls
“The remote desktop sharing with built-in controls from CVAD gave us the confidence to let our workforce securely connect their desktops/laptops at home to their office machines and start working on them as an extended screen,” observed the Onward IT team.
Needless to say, being able to access the corporate systems remotely without posing any threat to data security was the biggest factor in ensuring WFH success for Onward Technologies.
Optimized Employee Experience Boosts Productivity
That the workforce can see their respective systems as they would in their office and access the files and applications in the same manner has helped in creating a truly frictionless experience.
The effectiveness of the extended/remote desktop provided by CVAD lies in the fact that it delivers the same performance levels while accessing graphic-intensive applications like CAD as well. With the same refresh rates, the Citrix solution ensures a seamless rendering of graphics applications without any lags.
The overall optimized experience for the end-users has been a real game changer for the WFH experience for Onward Technologies. The result is there to see in the effectiveness of the work output. “With key delivery teams on CVAD solution, we were able to ensure business continuity and timely delivery on client projects amidst the unprecedented circumstances of the lockdown. The fact that the employees couldn’t go to the office was no longer a roadblock with the Citrix solution for Onward Technologies.”
Central Dashboard Eases Manageability
With a central management console, CVAD allows Onward Technologies to manage and control all the remote access systems with ease. Policy changes, patch updates, access permissions, etc. can be automatically updated from the central dashboard. Thus, saving precious time and resources and preventing the IT support team from getting over-burdened.
CVAD continues to be a key component of business continuity for Onward Technologies amidst the ongoing pandemic.
“CVAD has helped us maximize the potential of WFH with a highly effective and stable tool that lets our employees work without any hassles so that they can get their job done at the end of the day. That is ultimately the most important thing,” the Onward team felt.
