Following a migration from on-premise services to Citrix Cloud in 2019, Southern Housing Group was experiencing poor performance and a sub-standard experience for its end-users. Worried that this would affect its services to internal users and external customers, the housing providers arranged a full Citrix health check via Howell Technology Group (HTG). This included identifying environmental improvements and implementing a programme to improve service performance, system usability and the overall security of Southern Housing’s Citrix estate.
Because of the success of the Citrix project, Southern Housing engaged HTG as a trusted advisor to support other areas of its business, such as understanding its security posture and a further programme of remediation and security hardening within its Microsoft technologies.
Planning a merger
After discussions with the Regulator of Social Housing and the Financial Conduct Authority, Southern Housing announced plans to merge with Optivo. Having worked extensively with Southern Housing, HTG was asked to advise on the technical requirements of the potential merger (if approved). After considering residents’ feedback alongside financial due diligence and IT planning for a successful ‘day one’ of legal ownership, the merger was approved in July 2022.
Southern Housing, Optivo and HTG began implementing against the approved plan to deliver a merged tenant infrastructure. This allowed IT administrators to manage the entire organisation from a single Microsoft tenant, simplifying management, improving collaboration, reducing cost and enhancing security, all while presenting a single brand identity to external partners and customers.
After this, Southern Housing, Optivo, HTG and Microsoft’s industry solutions team collectively began to set the vision for post-merger operational integration. This included merging technology services and business systems, the retirement of Optivo’s largely on-premise environment and a consideration of the business change priorities and dependencies for the future.
This ‘day two’ migration between Southern Housing and Optivo was successfully completed in late 2023, with HTG delivering in collaboration with Microsoft’s global delivery teams.
Cost-effective cloud transformation
Post-merger, Southern Housing engaged with HTG to deliver a co-planned programme of work to ensure all applications resided in a single, secure Citrix environment.
An early step was to decommission Optivo’s on-premise Citrix environment and migrate it to Southern Housing’s cloud-hosted environment, thereby eliminating any reliance on on-premise hardware. By January 2024, the new organisation had a single Microsoft tenant, a single Active Directory of all users and a single cloud-hosted Citrix environment, hosting critical applications required by users of the newly merged organisation.
However, news began to circle within the Citrix community of significant increases in Citrix licensing subscriptions; by early 2024, there was clear evidence that these claims were accurate.
HTG has asked to investigate alternative virtual desktop solutions. It conducted a competitive analysis of numerous solutions and selected Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). This was based on the housing provider’s business needs and the provision of AVD licensing within its existing Microsoft licensing.
Successful AVD pilot
With AVD confirmed as the technology of choice, HTG launched a 50-user AVD pilot project across four business-critical applications. The success criteria for the pilot project comprised the delivery of a seamless connection to AVD from all devices and ensuring all in-scope applications launched as expected when installed in AVD.
After the successful pilot, Southern Housing committed to replacing its Citrix infrastructure with AVD before its licensing expiry in June 2024. The project parameters included delivery within 12 weeks – any longer and Southern Housing would have been faced with significant cost increases due to being locked into a further three-year licensing agreement with Citrix.
Million-pound migration
Southern Housing’s Citrix migration was planned over two phases to ensure a smooth transition to AVD.
In the first phase, HTG built a production environment, installed and tested the 18 applications identified for migration. HTG could then migrate over 5.5 million files of legacy on-premise data from Optivo to the new shared AVD client.
In the second phase, HTG packaged and deployed all 18 applications, delivered robust technical documentation, trained key IT leaders on AVD and implemented business continuity and disaster recovery services for the AVD platform (spanning multiple Microsoft Azure regions).
The efficiency of this migration underscored HTG’s commitment, skilled resources and ability to deliver rapid results while ensuring Southern Housing’s licensing subscription savings were secured.
Well-positioned for the future
Douglas Silverstone, director of technology, Southern Housing, said, “It has been a long-term ambition to decommission Citrix. Completion of this project saves us £1 million over three years and delivers a more flexible and robust architecture for the future.
“Our business was reliant on Citrix and the migration to AVD was a significant undertaking. With help from HTG, we’ve supported the business on our transition and delivered major positive change without business interruption.”
Interested in a cost-effective and secure alternative to Citrix, or want to explore how to achieve your goals with the Microsoft Partner of the Year 2024 Finalist for Secure Productivity? If so, please get in touch with HTG today.
