London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD) has partnered with leading Cloud and Digital Services Provider, ANS to deploy and scale a Azure Virtual Desktop(AVD) environment on which to run vital council services more efficiently and effectively.

The council, which is responsible for providing over 250 services to over 225,000 citizens needed to replace their aging Citrix desktop capability. With tight budget constraints, the council needed to ensure best value from a technology perspective, whilst continuing to ensure the successful delivery of new digital initiatives.

ANS delivered their AVD Accelerator which is designed to get organisations up and running with a fully functional production grade Azure Virtual Desktop environment in the cloud in just a matter of weeks.

Since deploying the solution, the council now has over 1,000 users working on the platform to access key council services including housing management systems and revenues and benefits services.

Paul Ingram, CIO at LBBD commented, “Over the last few months, the pandemic has forced us to change the way we work. Our existing desktop solution was approaching end-of-life and so it made sense to look for a more cost-effective and dynamic solution which Azure Virtual Desktop is now providing. Now that this solution is live, we’re in the process of exploring how we can continue to scale and build upon the platform to solve key business challenges across the council.”

“We decided to partner with ANS on this project due to their proven experience and expertise across local government. Their Accelerator ensured the project was not only delivered on budget but was also delivered within a critical deadline.”

ANS’ CTO, Andy Barrow added, “Local authorities across the council are under pressure than ever before to deliver more with less. LBBD saw their aging Citrix environment as an opportunity to adopt a more cost effective and flexible solution that aligned with their cloud first strategy and I’m glad ANS were able to deploy this solution so rapidly and at a fixed cost. I look forward to continuing to strengthen our relationship as we help them to explore other areas of the council that can benefit from this solution.”