When one of the UK’s best known and oldest Christian charities works in the community, its staff rely on a thin client infrastructure to deliver social services to some of the most vulnerable people in society. The ease of management and security of this approach is leading the Salvation Army to extend and enhance its virtual desktop infrastructure with the latest Wyse cloud client computing solutions.
The Salvation Army is one of the largest, most diverse providers of social services in the UK after the Government. Founded in East London in 1865, the Salvation Army is both a church and registered charity that demonstrates its Christian principles through social welfare provision.
The best known part of the Army’s social work is its network of homeless people hostels around the country. These have evolved to become Lifehouses that offer activities and training to help improve clients’ self-esteem, mental health and employment prospects. The centres are helping to break the cycle of homelessness and transform lives with people re-housed, reunited with their families and getting back into work.
The refocusing of its social welfare works has happened almost in parallel with an equally radical departure from traditional desktop computing for its staff in the Lifehouses and social centres.
As Martyn Croft, CIO, The Salvation Army, explains: “Like any charity working with vulnerable people, information technology plays an important supporting role in how we work with individuals to rebuild their lives. But, we realised that traditional set up of personal computers, a server and network connection was not the best way of delivering information services.”
The biggest challenge was how to manage individual set-ups of desktops and servers in over 120 very diverse locations nationwide with the limited IT resources of a charity. The support issues could be extremely labour intensive and time consuming with members of the IT team dispatched onsite to resolve problems or do upgrades.
“When you are supporting so many users in some many different locations, finding a new way to make the desktops easier to manage strongly appealed and led us to switch to a Wyse thin client infrastructure at the grass roots.”
The team selected Wyse S10 thin clients as the new desktops because they are extremely robust, easy to configure and control centrally. This has transformed how the team looks after its desktop end users in the Lifehouses, as Croft explains:
“On the rare times, when we needed to replace units, our local people simply had to swap out the old unit and plug in the new one we sent them. In fact our desktop support costs for the Lifehouses dropped down to the cost of a first class stamp and a Jiffy bag.”
The benefit of moving to the thin client infrastructure has come to the fore as Croft’s team has worked on regular and special system upgrades.
Taking a thin client approach enabled the organisation to tailor IT to specific local requirements in the Lifehouses and social centres. Staff needed a basic desktop environment and this is delivered using Wyse S10 thin clients running Wyse Thin OS and Microsoft Terminal Services.
Additionally it was important that the local desktops were secure with no need for any data to be stored onsite either at the desktop or in a local server. With no moving parts, the Wyse S10s also are robust and well suited to bustling environments within the Army’s Lifehouses.
How the Wyse thin clients allowed him to design in stronger data protection while delivering the right level of IT services and data access at the organisation’s grassroots is a strong driver for Croft: “I am passionate about the importance of information security for charities like ours that work in social welfare. Working with our clients, we are entrusted with sensitive data about very vulnerable people and their cases, as well as the personal details of our supporters and donors, making it critical to embed the strongest possible data protection into our IT infrastructure. That is why Wyse thin clients and their inherent security are a vital component within our information security.”
The use of Wyse thin clients is now well established in the Army’s front line services with positive feedback from end users and the IT team. As a charitable organisation, the shift to virtual desktops is also meeting the requirement for rigorous value for money especially since the first units were installed more than five years ago.
“We are finding that the total cost of ownership is lower because of the thin clients’ longer longevity as a high performing client device that we do not need to replace after a few years. With traditional desktop PCs, we have found they lasted around three or four years, while the Wyse thin clients keep on performing as expected and are demonstrating to us that claims of a 10 year working lifespan are very credible.”
Having established this basic approach at its grassroots, the Salvation Army is now exploring how it can evolve its thin client infrastructure and expand desktop virtualisation to more parts of the organisation. The impetus for this work is how the infrastructure can accommodate rich multimedia.
“For both our social welfare work and ministry, we are finding that audio and video streaming are a requirement at the desktop for e-learning or how our officers now preach in our church halls using Powerpoint. While it is ideal for the core work done with our clients in the field, we recognised that the current infrastructure is not designed for delivering multimedia content and applications.”
This has led the Salvation Army to choose Citrix HDX as the desktop virtualisation environment for the next stage in its moving the rest of the organisation away from traditional desktop computing. Citrix HDX meets the Army’s new requirements for a virtual desktop infrastructure that delivers a superior multimedia experience especially for audio and video.
Key to this decision is the availability of the Wyse Xenith zero clients for HDX that will enable the Salvation Army to maximise their investment in Citrix HDX for the long term.
“The doors really opened when we saw how the combination of Wyse Xenith zero clients and Citrix XenDesktop maximised the benefits of HDX technology. In answering our requirements for a superior multimedia experience, we will be able to extend the benefits of desktop virtualisation to a much wider community of end users who previously would only have accepted a high performance PC on their desk.”
The Salvation Army will also benefit from how zero clients further simplify the desktop client management. Unlike the thin clients, the zero clients have no local OS to boot, patch or manage, and as such are even easier to manage and need no endpoint protection from viruses or malware.
The new Wyse Xenith virtual desktop environment will operate alongside the current thin client infrastructure. As one of the pilot projects for the Wyse Xeniths, the Army is replacing the PCs used by the students and teaching staff at the Salvation Army’s own theological college, the William Booth College. The support for dual screens, in addition to the speed and support for working with the latest multimedia applications, makes the Xeniths an ideal desktop for teaching and learning in the college.
The new virtual desktops at the college will go live in summer 2011. As Croft explains this will be a significant step in the how the virtual technology is adopted in the future: “When fully implemented, the new Wyse virtual desktops will be an integral feature of the college’s newly refurbished facilities and therefore how we educate the next generation of Salvation Army officers.”
The Salvation Army is adept at keeping pace with changes in society with new approaches to how it supports local communities with social services and ministry. A similar innovation is seeing the organisation steadily move away from traditional computing to a Wyse-based virtual desktop infrastructure that is more flexible, secure and efficient.
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