

Working in close partnership with AWS, the team determined they could immediately and efficiently deploy the Windows 10 build from the existing proof of concept and scale capacity to accommodate the target of 1,700 workspaces. DOC staff were not classed as essential workers and so had to work from home, which meant DOC and Fujitsu had little time to scale out its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform to over 3,500 users. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, the project took on a new urgency. Over time, the fleet of workspaces had grown to around 1,600 since the initial migration. Since this point Fujitsu has provided optimised cloud managed services from its DevOps cloud engineering team, working in partnership with DOC and Amazon Web Services.

As a long-term partner, Fujitsu had already migrated 300 virtual servers to AWS EC2, with 350 AWS workspaces, as part of this cloud-first journey. The strategy was built around moving workloads to the cloud, to not only take advantage of the ‘cloud as a service’ model, and the benefits of moving to an OPEX based model for infrastructure costs, but also to move to remote working as a priority in the architecture and design. DOC has pursued a ‘cloud-first’ strategy for the last five years to support remote working across different networks with the ability to scale with demand.

DOC is a dispersed organisation, with 130 locations spread across New Zealand and up to 3,500 employees – many of whom work in remote areas, over limited bandwidth.
