Financial services provider moves digital workspaces for over 4,000 users to the public cloud - and now saves up to 40 percent of the costs for failsafe operation
MLP SE, headquartered in Wiesloch, is one of Germany's leading financial services providers. Since 1971, the group of companies has been helping its clients to make the right decisions for their own financial success. Instead of using its own products, MLP draws on the offerings of all relevant providers on the market for this purpose. In this way, the group is able to advise clients individually and comprehensively. Today, MLP manages assets of around 54 billion euros for more than 567,000 private and 25,000 corporate clients, as well as property insurance portfolios of around 620 million euros.
To optimally support the Group's 2,200 employees and around 2,000 client advisors in their work, MLP had already decided to switch to virtualized workspaces in 2014. At that time, the company set up a Citrix environment and provided applications and desktops via central servers for all IT users. In the internal network, managed fat clients were largely replaced by efficient thin clients - for the client advisors, they introduced a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) concept.
Citrix offered us the flexibility to use almost any device for secure access to our applications," says Michael Mahlbacher, head of the workplace department at MLP. "This allowed consultants to decide for themselves which device they wanted to use for their work - and we were able to ensure that sensitive data resided exclusively on our servers and not on users' endpoints."
The original Citrix environment ran in two geographically dispersed data centers. MLP was supported in operating this infrastructure by a large outsourcing partner. When the contract with the service provider expired, the company decided to realign its workspace strategy with Citrix DaaS. The entire Citrix environment was to be moved to the public cloud and rebuilt at Microsoft Azure.
"We expected three main benefits from the new strategy: more flexible use of resources according to our actual needs, easier scalability and lower costs for fully redundant operation of the infrastructure," says Mahlbacher.
For the planning and implementation of the cloud migration, MLP brought in the expert support of Citrix partner Provectus. The IT service provider's specialists developed a solution architecture for the future workspace infrastructure and prepared the move to Microsoft Azure.
In addition to switching to a current server operating system, this also included migrating the approximately 120 existing business applications of the MLP Group to the new Citrix DaaS environment. Provectus set up a pilot environment in Azure, where all applications were extensively tested. Some applications had to be updated or reconfigured during this process. This affected, for example, a scanning application that consultants use to capture paper documents and then process them digitally. Provectus adapted this application so that it continued to function smoothly in the new environment. Each individual business application was finally approved by the respective application owner.
The IT partner also supported MLP in setting up the productive environment in Azure. The virtual servers for Citrix DaaS were dimensioned in such a way that MLP's users benefit at all times from optimal user experience and the shortest possible response times when accessing the applications.
After several hundred test users had already gained initial experience with the new digital working environment, all employees were finally switched to the Citrix infrastructure in Azure within a few days.
Secure and convenient working from any location
MLP and Provectus worked closely together to make the transition as easy as possible for employees. Technical challenges in the start-up phase were overcome together - and the user experience was continually improved.
"In the course of the changeover, we optimized the user profile management with Citrix Workspace Environment Management service and were thus able to noticeably speed up the logon to the digital workspaces," reports Mahlbacher. "So users have much faster access to their business applications - no matter where they are and what device they are working with."
In addition, updating the Citrix environment also opened up new options for users. Many MLP consultants now use iPads to conveniently access business applications and contract data while on the road - for example, when meeting with clients. With the new Citrix DaaS solution, these users can now use touch control for all applications in their digital workspace - even for applications that do not natively support touch options.
The security architecture of MLP's digital workspaces has also been enhanced. For user login, the financial services provider now uses Azure AD multifactor authentication. Users can thus log on to their user desktop securely and conveniently from anywhere. "The new solution made it easier for us to deal with the changing conditions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic," says Mahlbacher "It enables us to protect access to applications and data even better against the cyber risks of the hybrid working world."
Scaling IT resources as needed
In Michael Mahlbacher's view, the biggest advantage of the new strategy is greater flexibility: "If we hire more consultants, acquire new partners or simply need more power for innovative applications, we no longer have to invest in additional hardware. We can provide the IT resources we need with just a few clicks."
Cloud resources that are not being used can also be shut down just as flexibly. Using the autoscale function, for example, the virtual machines in the Citrix environment are gradually shut down in the evening as soon as the last user on a server has logged off. MLP can thus minimize the costs for Azure usage and only pays for the computing power actually used.
40 percent lower costs for geo-redundant IT operations
Today, MLP also achieves high cost efficiency with regard to the infrastructure resilience required by the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin). For regulatory reasons, the financial services provider is required to maintain enough resources so that users could continue their work within the shortest possible time even if the primary infrastructure were to fail. "In the previous architecture, we therefore had our Citrix infrastructure split between two locations and operated around 40 percent more servers around the clock than we actually needed on a day-to-day basis," explains Mahlbacher.
In the cloud-based architecture, the prescribed redundancy could be realized much more cost-effectively. Provectus set up a "cold standby" environment for MLP in a different geographical zone of Microsoft Azure. Should the primary infrastructure actually become unavailable, all key systems could be booted up within about two hours in this standby environment. This would enable MLP to resume business operations very quickly.
"With the new Citrix environment in Microsoft Azure, we meet all the regulatory requirements of the financial industry for geo-redundant and highly available IT operations - and save around 40 percent of infrastructure costs while significantly increasing operational stability," summarizes Mahlbacher. "For this reason alone, the move to the public cloud has paid off for us."
