ESIC: Universal access to academic resources with UDS Enterprise

• Name: ESIC Business and Marketing school

• Sector: Education

• Number of Alumni: Over 62,000

• Campus and location: 12 campuses spread throughout the Spanish geography. Main building in Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid (Spain)

ESIC Business and Marketing School has solved the challenges posed by the pandemic by accelerating its digitization process. The prestigious Business School leader in training in business, marketing, and digital economy in Spain has taken advantage of the most cutting-edge technologies’ capabilities. They have configured a complete virtualization solution that allows them to comply with health measures and continue to provide exceptional training to their students.

With the aim that students can take their degrees from any location, they have built an innovative platform that combines virtual desktops, virtualized applications, and remote access to classroom computers. The achievement of this project has been feasible thanks to UDS Enterprise, the central axis of the infrastructure. This software is in charge of automatically managing, deploying, and monitoring all resources’ life cycle. It is also the access vehicle used, on the one hand, by students and teachers to use the training tools and, on the other, by the IT team to manage and control the entire computing environment.

Classroom capacity limitations to guarantee safety distances have forced the restriction of the use of practically half of the school’s computers, depriving students of universal access to their main study tools. Added to the impossibility of using these computers is the handicap that they have licensed software installed that can only be used on said machines, which have the optimal power and hardware requirements to run these programs smoothly.

“We needed to centralize access to these physical computers and our virtualized applications so that students could connect through their devices. We opted for UDS Enterprise due to the maturity of the solution and its standardization in the education sector,” explains Carlos Salas, ESIC IT Manager.

The software’s versatility favored them to consider creating a hybrid platform to provide the programs to the students in the most efficient way. For example, they have virtualized office suites or statistics applications. Graphic design programs are installed on physical computers, and virtual desktops are deployed for other use cases.

Despite the technical complexity of the infrastructure, the configuration, customization, and commissioning “took place in a matter of weeks. This says a lot in favor of the ease of implementation of UDS Enterprise,” says Salas.

Students have gained flexibility and freedom of schedules. They can now access the programs 24×7, from any place and operating system. “Above all, they value the ease of access and the stability of the solution. The feedback from the teachers is also very positive,” assures the Head of IT.

FAST AND UNLIMITED SCALABILITY

To date, some 1,500 ESIC users use the eLearning platform with UDS Enterprise. This figure will increase according to the needs of the school. The scalability of the solution makes it possible to grow and shrink the number of users flexibly. As this educational center has a UDS Enterprise subscription for unlimited users, these variations do not have any economic impact.

All this, together with the security guarantees offered by the solution, has favored that the IT department is already outlining a remote working system for the entire workforce. “We are evaluating the implementation of UDS Enterprise to provide access from any location to the employees’ local applications,” states Carlos Salas

ESIC’s innovative distance learning and remote working project is supported by Quer System, a UDS Enterprise Gold Partner. Its specialists have been in charge of designing, installing, customizing, and commissioning the platform. “Their help has been invaluable. They have proven to be excellent and very close professionals. They have always been available to give us their support when we have required it,” Salas values.

They have also had the technical support of the UDS Enterprise team. “To solve particular aspects, we have contacted them, and the best thing has been their speed and efficiency in the responses,” he says.

Thanks to its commitment to UDS Enterprise, ESIC has adapted to the current healthcare situation’s new demands in a fast, simple, and affordable way. This technology has allowed their initial VDI project to evolve into a much more complete environment while remaining technically and economically viable.

VDI, vApp & REMOTE ACCESS INFRASTRUCTURE

• Broker: UDS Enterprise

• Hypervisor: VMware vSphere

• Connection protocols: HTML5 and RDP

• Authenticator: AzureAD

• Physical machines’ manager: OpenGnsys

• Physical PCs OS: Windows

• Main virtualized vApp:

  • Office suites

  • Statistics

• Access OS: Any