Business challenge
“From a disaster recovery perspective, we’d like our employees to work from anywhere,” says Deputy CIO Kyle Edgeworth. “In the event of an emergency, we need to be agile. We need access to our systems and our data."
With public sector operating budgets acting as a key factor, the city requires the flexibility to scale cloud services up or down as required and to wring maximum value from its resources. Further, with a relatively small IT team, it is imperative that they efficiently align resources around the needs of the business. “We want to be a data-driven city. We want to add new services. Citrix allows us to maximize our IT investments,” says Edgeworth.
City Manager, Darrell Talbert, adds: “The City’s goal to be data-driven is no longer a choice but a necessity for efficient and sustainable government.”
“Ultimately, this kind of project should be judged a success if it has improved outcomes for citizens,” continues Edgeworth. “For instance, with more effective field teams, could we be quicker to clean up graffiti? Or could we improve computer services in libraries with a clean VDI environment? Could we create a network of local kiosks for citizens to manage their accounts? All of this becomes possible.”
The solution
These motives are driving the city’s cloud-first IT strategy. It began using Microsoft Azure in February 2017 and also committed to Office 365. “Those were our first steps,” says Edgeworth. “The future is to have the whole city on Citrix VDI.”
This will do more than disaster-proof the city’s services, Edgeworth explains. By deploying Citrix Workspace, Corona will be more effective in the way it delivers services, the IT team can be quicker to support new initiatives, and it will simplify collaboration across different departments.
The benefits to the IT team are equally transformative. The IT team will transform from a reactive, fixer of problems to a business enabler.
“It will enable us to examine all our processes,” says Edgeworth. “ROI is important to a local government, but it is not the only driver. Being able to free up the time of our employees will deliver other, more long-term benefits.”
Edgeworth himself was evacuated from his home for a week in 2018, with wildfires passing less than a mile from his house: “I managed to access my work remotely, but I could see the value Citrix Workspace will have for all our employees. We want to get to a stage where employees understand that everything they need to carry out their work can be accessed through Citrix.”
Initially, Edgeworth had considered other cloud solution vendors, but there was limited availability in the government cloud. “We looked at other cloud products versus Citrix Workspace, but Citrix was leaps and bounds ahead. Citrix was already proving themselves in the government space and had a lot of features that weren’t available by other vendors.”
Results
