Case Study: Surrey County Council achieves faster logons, GCSX compliance and more users per server with AppSense

AppSense allows Surrey County Council to manage workforce and ensure government code compliance

Surrey County Council, which supports 1.06 million residents with an IT estate serving 8,000 staff across 300 sites, replaced an aging PC-based environment with a Citrix XenApp farm to cut costs and enable remote access. After the migration they faced slow logons over low-bandwidth WAN links, uncontrolled execution of unauthorized applications that risked stability and GCSX compliance, and the need to maximize users per Citrix server while reducing power and management overhead.

The council deployed AppSense DesktopNow (Performance Manager, Application Manager and Environment Manager) to enforce application entitlement, allocate resources and optimize profiles. The result was much faster logons (seconds instead of minutes), elimination of profile corruption, automatic blocking of unauthorized apps and compliance with GCSX, higher user density per server, lower power use and a consistent, predictable user experience—while plans continue to expand Citrix/thin-client use and extend AppSense for license management.

Surrey County Council

Girish Gorasia

Principal Consultant, Desktops and Citrix