Month: January 2022

About Deaf Services(DS)

Deaf Services (DS) is the prominent service provider for the Deaf and hard of hearing community with a focus on community and empowerment. Deaf Services are a not-for-profit organisation working with the community to enhance services and programs that benefit Deaf and hard of hearing adults and children across Australia. Deaf Services provide a broad range of services including ageing support, lifestyle support, community integration, child education, interpreting and sign language education.

Why Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Deaf Services host several workloads on AWS and when it came time to implement an EUC (End User Compute) environment it made sense to build that on AWS. Deaf Services implemented an EUC solution using Amazon Workspaces for roughly 180 members of staff to be able to work remotely. The solution was rapidly implemented and for the most part was working really well.

Overview of the challenge

There were a few challenges that lead to DS working with WOLK Technology on a AWS Well Architected Review. For DS the main challenges were a lack of visibility of the state of the Workspaces, users complaining of slow login times and a blown out budget.

What is AWS Well Architected

AWS Well-Architected helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads. Based on five pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization — AWS Well-Architected provides a consistent approach for customers and partners to evaluate architectures, and implement designs that can scale over time.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework describes the key concepts, design principles, and architectural best practices for designing and running workloads in the cloud. By answering a set of foundational questions, you learn how well your architecture aligns with cloud best practices and are provided guidance for making improvements.

The Benefits of Working with AWS and WOLK Technology – an AWS Advanced consulting partner and “Amazon EC2 for Microsoft Windows” Solution Provider

WOLK worked with DS on a Well Architected Review with a particular focus on the Cost pillar. Through account visualisation and the Well Architected Review process we analysed the environment, customer needs and costs. We noticed that most staff worked more than 2 hours per day on average and some staff complained of connectivity issues in the mornings.

WOLK changed the running mode of the Workspaces fleet from “Auto-Stop” to “Always On” which gives DS a fixed monthly cost which helps with cost planning and analysis. “Auto-Stop” is great for users who work only a few hours at a time, giving a small monthly cost with a small hourly charge. If the service is used more regularly the hourly costs aggregate and eventually cost more than an “Always On” solution would, with fixed monthly costs.

WOLK then implemented a daily restart of the Workspaces instances, greatly reducing the number of issues the users were experiencing upon login. Combining the “Always On” option with a daily restart meant that the users had a much quicker login experience than before, saving an estimated 3 to 4 minutes per user per day. With 180+ users that very quickly adds up to a lot of wasted time waiting.

Moving DS from “Auto-Stop” to “Always On” and implementing the changes listed above saved DS roughly $4 000 per month in direct AWS usage costs and a further conservative estimate of $9000 in lost productivity savings.

WOLK implemented a 3rd party monitoring solution for the Deaf Services internal IT helpdesk to monitor the health of the EUC fleet, giving the IT helpdesk the power to rapidly see and fix issues before being contacted by end users.

WOLK also supplied DS with a dashboard which shows their compliance with the Well Architected standards from an account level while giving a daily snapshot of predicted vs actual vs budget cost.

Using Amazon Workspaces has been a great benefit for DS staff working from home during the Covid pandemic. Going forward DS believes that productivity will be maintained as they transition back into a more traditional / hybrid workplace as they know that the majority of staff will never return to the office.

About Northwest Investments(NWI)

Northwest Investments Pty Ltd (NWI) owns and operates a number of Quick Service Restaurants throughout Australia. NWI have a head office located in Melbourne and run a Payroll system called Accrivia.

Drivers to the Cloud

NWI was running an old SBS server in their head office location. The hardware was end of life and the operating system and operating environment were no longer supported. Connectivity for remote staff was also an issue with store managers needing to log into the central system to submit data.

Accrivia (Payroll system) is a WOLK partner and always recommend AWS and WOLK as their preferred cloud offering. This is where NWI and WOLK started their journey to the cloud. NWI wanted a system that was up to date, easy to use and allowed their remote staff better access to their systems.

“We needed to replace our aging hardware and considered several solutions and providers, the recommendation from Accrivia and the fact that WOLK supply services for a number of other similar franchisees made the decision easy” said Diana Earp, NWI.

Why Amazon Web Services (AWS)

NWI needed to replace their old server infrastructure and decided that cloud was the answer. As always, using a proven system is the easiest route to guaranteed success and WOLK had proven that it can provide solutions to other Accrivia customers, hosted on AWS.

Being the world’s biggest and most reliable public cloud provider, moving to AWS gave NWI a lot of certainty that their data would be safe. There would not be capacity or speed issues and all staff would have the same experience when using shared company resources.

WOLK implemented a new firewall appliance with failover to 4g at the NWI head office, which meant that the normal blocker of “what if my internet goes down” was negated very easily.

The Benefits of Working with AWS and WOLK Technology – an AWS Advanced consulting partner and “Amazon EC2 for Microsoft Windows” Solution Provider

NWI had been working with another Managed Service Provider (MSP) who made things a lot easier for WOLK to transition NWI to the cloud – often incumbent providers try and make things as difficult as possible. Moving all of NWI’s IT resources to WOLK meant that WOLK turned into their single point of contact for all their IT needs.

There was no longer a need for a VPN or insecure RDP connections. WOLK implemented an Amazon Workspaces solution which meant that everyone had access to everything they needed to do their job and meant that the store managers could be more efficient.

WOLK provided a very straightforward solution, which includes the EUC environment, File shares, Office applications, Payroll system and their Legacy apps. With a baseline cost, every additional user cost can be easily calculated to allow for planning.

Doing a client onboarding using a AWS Well Architected Review allows us to know a lot more about our clients than what we otherwise would have, which inevitably gives the customer a more robust and secure solution.

Most of the office-based staff now work from home and only occasionally go into the office. This is only possible because staff can now work from home with the same efficiency as working from the office, even if using BYOD home grade equipment. The ease of switching from office based to remote working is one of the key advantages to having a cloud native end user compute solution.

About HSA

Hydraulic Seals Australia (HSA) leads the hydraulic seals market in providing custom-engineered and OEM hydraulic components. With manufacturing and warehouses located in Melbourne West, Melbourne East, Sydney, Newcastle and Brisbane, HSA provides quality products along with highly trained professionals, each employee working directly with the customer from procurement to delivery and inventory management.

Drivers to the Cloud

HSA was running an end of life on-premise server solution which was extremely noisy to the point where it caused a disturbance to the workplace. After experiencing numerous problems with this ageing solution and not being able to keep up with the pace of demand, HSA decided to look for an alternative solution to overcome the challenges.

HSA decided to abandon the physical servers and move to a private cloud solution, belonging to a third-party private vendor. But with the provider failing to address the company needs and not being able to deliver the demand, HSA was facing new problems.

“We were exhausted by the constant issues we had to deal with relating to the third-party who hosted the servers for the company” said Kelly Barrett, HSA. “WOLK technology brought us hope and faith that we could overcome these issues by moving to AWS” she further stated.

Why Amazon Web Services (AWS)

With the disappointing experience of on-site and private cloud server offerings, HSA was looking for a reliable, agile solution that could cater for their growing requirements without the huge capital outlay.

Being the world’s biggest and most reliable public cloud provider, moving to AWS gave HSA a lot of certainty that their data would be safe. There would not be capacity or speed issues and all branches would have the same experience when using shared company resources.

HSA had big growth plans and needed a solution that could scale with them, while being able to stay within the company budget.

The Benefits of Working with AWS and WOLK Technology – an AWS Advanced consulting partner

HSA had been through a rough time with regards to their IT environment and needed a robust, performant solution that would not break the bank and could grow with them. WOLK understood the customer needs, especially the desire to be able to launch new branches with minimal fuss so WOLK implemented an EUC (End User Compute) environment for HSA to meet their needs. Because of external factors, there was a very small window during which WOLK managed to successfully migrate HSA from their old private cloud hosting facility to AWS.

Moving all compute resources to the cloud and keeping the data secure meant that the endpoint devices no longer had an influence on the user experience. We removed the need for endpoint devices to contain any data and we removed the need for a VPN between branches – this has significantly improved the customer’s security posture. Backups are automated, data is encrypted, users are kept away from data and the payroll system and data is no longer on shared resources.

WOLK provide our customers with a simple per user cost for usage and support, providing the customer with an easy to calculate growth path. HSA recently opened a new branch in Melbourne which was made very simple thanks to their scalable AWS environment. WOLK ordered an NBN connection, supplied the needed equipment for the new branch and configured the Firewall to use a 4g connection until the NBN went live, allowing the branch to start trading as soon as they were granted occupancy of the building.

During periods where access to the office is restricted, staff have the option of working from home with the same efficiency as working from the office, even if using BYOD home grade equipment. The ease of switching from office based to remote working is one of the key advantages to having a cloud native end user compute solution.