Aspida Case Study

The client

Three businesses in Guernsey identified an opportunity to pool their consumption of support services and in the process, improve the quality of back office functions thereby taking advantage of combined economies of scale. These services would be built and delivered by a separate services company.

The new entity – Aspida – would deliver IT, HR, accounting, facilities management and payroll services to all three businesses, taking responsibility for creating a suitable strategy for each area, and delivering it at lower costs.

The challenge

One of the first priorities was IT services. The three businesses needed one common, cost-effective remote access approach that would require minimal day-to-day administration, simplify their business continuity processes, minimise information security risks and improve their remote working capabilities.

There was also a need to guarantee all data remained within the Channel Islands in order to remove the possibility of clients’ sensitive data being subject to other jurisdictions’ data access laws.

The task of creating a single strategy was made more complex by the differences between the three pre-existing environments:

One of the businesses was a leading corporate governance and regulatory compliance service provider, Optimus Group, which operated on-premise and had its own internal IT infrastructure and team.
Another business was a new law firm which relied on constant access to its industry-specific unique applications, including Lawman from Timeslice, and needed additional skills and resources to maintain them.
And another business was a provider of Trust, Pension, Corporate and Fund services which operated on Macs.

The objectives were therefore simple: unify the disparate environments, simplify their business continuity processes and improve and individuals’ remote access to data and their ability to collaborate, and in the process, lower costs.

Key Requirements

The data residency stipulation ruled out many larger providers as they would naturally host data in Europe or the United States.

The disaster recovery requirements meant they needed a robust underlying cloud infrastructure.

Its focus on providing lower administration costs, improved business continuity and cost-effective remote access meant it would favour thin client VDIs, as opposed to thick clients which would require investment in hardware and local software.

Calligo's Solution

Some providers tried to meet the group’s requirement by offering thick client VDI options, but these would not remove enough cost or administrative overhead.

Others offered a cloud-based thin client VDI, but their back-end infrastructure was not flexible or robust enough to accommodate the business continuity requirements.

Calligo’s thin client VDI desktop-as-a-service, CloudDesk, is hosted on CloudCore, Calligo’s multi-jurisdiction, highly available, flexible and secure IaaS platform, with data residency guarantees and financially-backed performance SLAs. CloudDesk itself is a high performance VDI application with multiple connectivity options and full session encryption.

In total, Calligo provided approximately 50 CloudDesk licences, and the necessary CloudCore environment to underpin it. Calligo also provided a 24x7 managed service to support the internal IT team and users.

What the client said

“Calligo’s greatest strength in our selection process was their heritage in the cloud and data residency. Because of its datacentres on Guernsey and Jersey, Calligo was able to ensure our data was replicated across more than one site while always respecting our data residency needs. They also had the experience in cloud-based disaster recovery and back-ups enabling them to meet our requirements over scheduling, site duplication and recovery time and recovery point objectives. Plus, its thin client offering was exactly what we needed to lower our administration overheads.”

Nick Marquis, IT & Operations Manager at Aspida