Cassa di Risparmio di Volterra - a Bank that has long been operating in the Tuscany Region, with 550 members of staff, 75 branches and 80 ATMs – needed to renew workstations, whose hardware obsolescence was causing increasingly frequent inefficiencies in the use of new-generation applications, a significant increase in failures and operating stoppages.

In order to pursue maximum standardization of workstations, especially at branches, the Bank opted for the virtual desktop model, using Cedacri desktop management services and Citrix technologies. The main reasons for this choice, as stated by Cassa di Risparmio di Volterra, were the following:

• Better guarantees for system restore in case of failover, thanks to the outsourcer's disaster recovery infrastructure
• Possibility to outsource the entire service to Cedacri, from infrastructure maintenance to machine management, to the help-desk, thus allowing internal resources to focus on higher value-added activities
• Better accordance between virtual desktops and banking applications that had already been provided by Cedacri

The project for workstation renewal of Cassa di Risparmio di Volterra, for which the Bank chose the desktop virtualization model, concerned approximately 400 traditional workstations, which were converted into as many virtual workstations that, since then, have been managed by Cedacri. The project implementation started from the construction of the standard template for all virtual machines of the Bank, which was followed by a testing phase, first lab testing and then testing in sample branches. After such testing, the roll out phase was implemented, replacing all workstations: each action lasted approximately 15 minutes and entailed no stoppage in service provision to Customers.

The choice of desktop virtualization with Cedacri has allowed Cassa di Risparmio di Volterra to achieve a total reduction in expenses by over 30% compared with the classical solution with traditional PCs, better performance in the use of applications also at branches having slower network connections, a drastic reduction in calls for assistance and operating stoppages, as well as obvious streamlining in the workstation management (with 100% success for software updates, patching and distribution)