Case study: Branch Office and POS

A major retail chain, headquartered in the Midwest with more than 1200 small-to-medium points of sale globally, was experiencing a problem with its branch offices, and presented it to Zirtu engineers.

Each of its branch offices has under 100 users, and a constrained connection to headquarters (even in today's age of Gbit connections and fiber-optics, this happens surprisingly often in remote location infrastructure). Corporate IT, of course, is interested in managing the desktops of the branch office centrally, and keeping the machines there stateless, without worrying about end-point backup or disaster recovery.

Desktop virtualization immediately comes to mind. However, traditional VDI fails to deliver in this setting, even if the branch office users are all task workers and have no requirements for personalization or offline use. Because of the poor connection to headquarters, they are simply unable to use remote desktop connection architecture.

Using Zirtu to deliver centralized desktops to Branch Offices and retail units - with native execution and zero latency

After extensive field research and integration, the following was established:

• Branch offices are able to fully utilize Zirtu workspaces for their users, keeping end-points stateless and enabling centralized, singe-instance management of all common applications and the corporate OS image.
• Using Zirtu's transparent offline use capability, users' workspaces remain 100% operational whether or not a connection to HQ is available at any given time. When no connection is available, changes are accumulated until there is a connection, and are centralized at first available opportunity.
• In larger branch offices, branch office storage is deployed (SAN/NAS), accumulating all changes and reducing bandwidth requirements. That storage is in turn communicating with HQ centralized storage
• HQ-stationed IT staff no longer needs to manage, patch and back-up physical workstations in branch offices. All workstations are managed and delivered centrally, fulfilling IT's requirements.
• Users' workspaces are executed on their end-points, providing native experience and unhindered performance - eliminating user frustration and maintaining full productivity. All workstations maintain full connectivity to peripheral devices, such as barcode readers, label printer, receipt printers.

Results

After deploying Zirtu for its remote locations, IT has been able to achieve the following, depending on location and branch size:

• Cut branch-office related IT management hours by 35%
• Eliminate the issue of disaster recovery and backup of branch office workstations
• New user provisioning is reduced to a "shopping cart" style process of picking the appropriate application sets from a list - and reducing total time by up to 80%

Next steps

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