An education in remote working

The New Albany-Floyd County Consolidated School Corporation is a public school district and has operated as a separate governmental unit since 1956. Located in Floyd County, Indiana, the district’s enrollment totals approximately 12,000 students in pre-kindergarten through high school programs, and employs more than 1,200 full-time personnel. When the school district needed to support immediate work from home solutions in response to COVID-19, they turned to Scale Computing.

“Before this situation started we were not a work-from-home organisation. Most administrative staff needed to be in the office to access critical applications. When the orders came down to close the schools, our team was tasked with finding a solution,” said Chris Bowers, IT Manager at The New Albany-Floyd County Consolidated School Corporation. “Scale Computing provided the configuration, architecture and virtual machines free of charge, and offered the trial VDI licenses for free for a month during the crisis. We were so grateful our IT infrastructure partner stepped up to help during this time of need.”

At the end of 2019, Bowers and IT leadership decided it was time to migrate from their existing, legacy IT infrastructure. The school district wanted improved management and efficiency, as well as an extra level of redundancy. When the new reality of the COVID-19 pandemic and workforces being mandated to work from home settled in, Bowers and team were already about 90% of the way finished with their migration to the Scale Computing HC3 platform.

“When the work from home order was delivered the administrative offices needed connectivity and access, but many of the staff did not have a computer at home. Purchasing laptops was not going to happen in such a short time frame, and we did not want the security risk of opening up VPN connectivity to devices we do not manage,” Bowers shared. 

“Luckily, we did have Chromebooks on hand and we issued those to people who needed them, but critical applications were a mix of web-based and internally-hosted applications. Scale Computing had emailed their customers with details for a fast solution, and it met our needs. The message claimed deployment would be in an hour or less, and honestly we didn’t really believe it. But it was true – we timed it and we were able to finish deployment in just under an hour. We had the school staff up and running, working from home, and we haven’t received a single support call since. It all just works.”

Leveraging virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology, Scale Computing packaged two virtual machine images customers can download for free, and put together a how-to video and trained technical support staff to assist them in deploying the remote work technology solution. The VDI Connection Broker, Gateway, and Agent provide easy, intuitive configuration and management for the Scale Computing HC3 environment, whether using remote access, only on-premise access, or a combination of both. No additional devices or services are needed to get organisations up and running quickly.

“We are proud we could create a secure, innovative and easy solution to support our customers when they needed us,” said Jeff Ready, CEO and Co-Founder at Scale Computing. “This short-term remote solution prepares customers for future IT transformation with a true VDI deployment. Scale Computing HC3 virtualisation and VDI solutions provide a simple solution with rapid deployment, ease of management and high availability.”