Case: Unemployment insurance fund A&Til

A&Til

A&Til is an interdisciplinary unemployment insurance fund with approx. 140,000 members. A&Til cooperates with 60 trade unions, which provides in-depth knowledge of the members’ professions and industries. In addition to unemployment benefits and early retirement benefits, A&Til offers free job and career counseling and salary protection. A&Til has approx. 170 employees.

Rigid and Expensive Outsourcing of IT Operations

A&Til had left the operation of its IT environment to a major Danish outsourcing partner. “When I came to A&Til 7 years ago, the operation was managed externally and far from optimal,” CIO Peter Meleschko explains. “The basic operation worked to a wide extent impeccably, but, for instance, change requests were expensive, and handled very rigidly. Furthermore the quality in troubleshooting was poor.”

“And in addition, a part of the IT department – the service desk staff was reduced to a dispatch office where the employees’ sole function was to forward the many requests from our users to our outsourcing partner. This did not correspond with my employees’ professional selfunderstanding,” Peter Meleschko explains. Therefore, A&Til made a decision – partly to reinsource the responsibility for the IT operation, and partly to build a new data center from scratch.

“We only had very few applications running in our own server room, so building a brand new data center was a demanding task. For this reason, I contacted Lean-On, who I knew from earlier projects, where they had helped our outsourcing partner.”

During the establishment of the new data center, Peter Meleschko’s overall benchmark was to provide the users with an outstanding user experience. It became Lean-On’s role to create a private cloud that could really perform, based on their experience and leading practice on how a virtual environment is best supported and optimized, through the best choice of design. “In fact, they completely tuned the hardware down to firmware level, in order to create the best foundation for the private cloud. In addition, we virtualized just about all our servers,” Peter Meleschko explains.

The new solution went into production by the turn of the year. It was a big change. “The users experienced a huge improvement,” Peter Meleschko said enthusiastically. “Our new environment had an outstanding performance and was completely reliable. The service desk tickets fell by 75 percent over a period of eight months!”

The private cloud was established with growth in mind, and A&Til wanted to make use of the latest technology. “Our data center was actually a pilot for the Lean-On Private Cloud Platform – the custom-designed service that Lean-On has developed in order to specifically create a fast and reliable VDI operation.” And Peter Meleschko is very pleased with the upgrade.

Peter Meleschko, CIO

A&Til

Effective, Mobile Users & Platform Independence

“It was good prior to the upgrade, and the users were happy. But with the upgrade, we have gained access to significant innovations. We are for instance very pleased with the GPUs, which the virtualization technology uses in an outstanding way, so the load coming from the heavy graphics on the system, is moved from the clients to the servers. This enables us to deliver a unique user experience on our desktops, even when it comes to graphics.”

“Employees access our extensive industry systems through a browser. This is also at a much faster speed now, and no one experiences slow keyboard responses. The improvement is noticeable especially for our mobile users.” It is important for Peter Meleschko that the mobile users are satisfied: “Almost all of our users are mobile. Some work at home and others – for example, our job consultants often work out in the job centers. It is important that they can access our resources externally. And in addition, most of the in-house employees are mobile as well, because they work with virtual offices, where they change physical location within the office building during the day as needed. But no matter where our users are, they always have their desktop.

Similarly, when a user requires access to a new tool, it is nice and easy for us in the IT department to comply with the request, thus we are agile in relation to the needs of the business.” “We now have a solution with a private cloud that creates exceptionally good performance for our IT environment. Our users are happy and can use the devices they want. And for us in the IT department, life has become more fun, as we manage our environment internally, and can make changes as needed, and with a better outcome.” Peter Meleschko, CIO in A&Til, concludes.

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