Virtual Desktop & App Virtualization for GMS Leadership, a leading Maritime Company in UAE

About Company

One of the world’s largest buyer of ships and floating offshore assets for recycling. They were established in the US in 1992 and are now primarily based in the UAE but have offices all over the world. For more than 29 years, they have been an innovator and leader in the ship recycling industry, boldly facing challenges, and finding sensible solutions. With over 4,000 deals and offices and representatives in all of the major shipping and recycling markets worldwide, they are one of the only companies in the world to offer end-to-end, high value, one-stop solutions for maritime assets.

Project Summary

They had aging servers and outdated software running in their on-premises environment along with a VDI solution.

Eventually the lack of upgrades led to them facing security breaches, frequent downtimes and poor performance in their on-premises environment.

They started to look for migration options in the cloud to save on CapEx costs.

After evaluating the cloud options, they felt inclined to select Microsoft Azure because of it’s high availability, dynamic scalability, top-notch security, cost optimization options, integration of Windows services and the option to utilize Windows Virtual Desktop as a VDI solution.

Challenge

Being a global organization with multiple teams, business groups and their scattered customers, it was difficult coordinating with everyone and understanding their and their customers’ requirements.

They wanted their Azure environment to be as secure as possible to avoid any security vulnerabilities.

They wanted to make use of the highly available, redundant and scalable capabilities of Azure.

With their users being spread across the globe, they wanted to make sure the user experience was acceptable for all their employees.

Disaster Recovery was something they felt needed to be implement so that they can quickly resume their mission-critical operations in case of a disaster. Also, ability to perform Disaster Recovery drills to ensure Business Continuity during a disaster.

Solution

Our team of experts reached out to us to help them migrate their on-premises environment to Azure as per the best practices. We began by first analyzing their on-premises environment to avoid any migration issues.

Based on the migration plan, we were able to migrate their entire on-premises infrastructure to Azure and also, modernize their VDI by implementing Windows Virtual Desktop.

We used Azure Site Recovery to setup a quick and fluid Disaster Recovery Plan. Azure Security Center was able to fulfill the security requirements of GMS.