Benalmádena City Council enables remote working with UDS

• Name: Benalmádena City Council

• Sector: Public Administration

• Number of inhabitants: Around 70.000

• Number of employees: Over 250

• Number of offices: Over 20

• Location: Benalmádena (Málaga, Spain)

Thanks to their commitment to desktop virtualization with UDS Enterprise, the Benalmádena City Council (Málaga) has managed to implement a secure remote working system quickly and efficiently. As explained by this local administration in an official statement, “having a desktop virtualization system infrastructure in place has been decisive for the implementation of telecommuting“.

As they already had a VDI platform with UDS Enterprise for years, the Computing and New Technologies area of this City Council was able to anticipate the situation and began to tune its computer systems to facilitate remote work days before the declaration of the alarm status. This swiftness of action has allowed around 250 employees to be working from home since the health alert was issued due to Covid-19, avoiding the risk of contagion and spread of the disease. The Councilor for New Technologies of this City Council, Sergio Torralvo, explained that “the adaptation of this local administration to the digital world has made it easier for municipal employees responsible for administrative work to have access to telecommuting on a massive scale“.

For his part, the Mayor of the town, Víctor Navas, has recognized the effort made by the staff of the New Technologies Area to apply “in record time the necessary changes in the system, which have allowed us to guarantee municipal employees can work from home in optimal and efficient conditions ”. These configurations have been made with help from the UDS Enterprise team. “The changes we have had to make have been minimal, since our platform with this VDI broker already had the infrastructure for remote work preconfigured. To put it into production it has only been necessary to assign a public IP to the service and adjust some parameters,” says Juan Francisco Vera Ramos, Head of the IT and Communications Bureau. “We immediately had the environment up and running and began to carry out the first connection tests both from laptops, desktops, Android tablets… with great results and needing little work by the Technical Section of Computing and New Technologies,” he assures.

90% of city council workers who require computer tools to carry out their tasks access them through non-persistent virtual desktops. For their VDI infrastructure they rely on the joint solution formed by the UDS Enterprise connection broker, Nutanix hyperconvergence system and Acropolis AHV hypervisor from the same manufacturer.

The flexibility of UDS Enterprise has helped them configure a fully customized remote work solution tailored to their needs. “To give an example, we have prioritized connections by RDP over HTML5 to guarantee the optimal operation of the cryptographic card in which the certificates of public employees are stored,” says Juan Francisco Vera.

SECURITY, MONITORING AND BYOD

UDS Enterprise has also allowed them to incorporate strong security measures. Among them, Vera highlights that they have “blocked data traffic from the user’s computer to the virtual desktop, in order to avoid the possible transfer of viruses/malware to the virtualization infrastructure”.

Among other aspects, the advantages that this solution provides for presence control also stand out. UDS Enterprise allows to monitor the existing connections at a specific time and the full historical records. The system automatically generates reports with this data. “This information is essential for the Personnel Department. Having the information on when a user opens and closes his session in such a simple way is an important added value, it is being of great help to us,” says Vera. “The log of connections it generates is quite rich in information and easy to process. It has allowed us, through a small application that we have developed ourselves, to feed a database for its later exploitation,” he adds.

This Town Hall began the process of implementing electronic administration five years ago. Within this line of action, they opted for desktop virtualization for workplace modernization, replacing the obsolete previous computers with much cheaper and more modern devices. They serve as connection clients to the virtual desktops and applications managed and deployed with UDS Enterprise. “The versatility of this software allowed us to replace computers with thin clients in municipal offices and now makes it possible for employees to use their own devices to work from home“, says the head of the Systems Information Bureau and Communications.

From the first moment, they have had the support of the team behind the VDI broker and MicroCAD, VirtualCable Gold Partner. “The UDS Enterprise support team does a magnificent job, they provide a very personalized attention, and we have always obtained a response to our issues quickly and efficiently“, values Vera.

Now, the close collaboration of the UDS Enterprise experts with the professionals of the Benalmándena City Council has favored that the implementation of remote working has been a success. Together, they have ensured that the productivity of administrative staff and citizen service have not been affected by the limitations imposed by the state of alarm declared to curb the Coronavirus.

VDI INFRASTRUCTURE

• Broker: UDS Enterprise

• Hypervisor: Nutanix Acropolis (AHV)

• Connection protocol: RDP

• Authenticator: Active Directory

• VDI OS: Windows Server 2016 Datacenter and Windows 10

• VDI access OS: Any

• Hyper-convergence platform: Nutanix