Case Study: Charityshare achieves £15 million savings, increased productivity and secure, flexible virtual desktops with Citrix XenDesktop

Charityshare provides innovative network support and services with Citrix

Charityshare is a joint IT services venture of The Children’s Society, Age UK and Alzheimer’s Society that supports more than 7,000 PC users across 500 UK locations, from large hubs to single-user sites. It needed a more flexible, secure way for staff and volunteers to access applications from varied devices and low-bandwidth sites, while reducing on-site support, software licensing costs and the risk of sensitive data exposure.

Charityshare deployed a Citrix virtual desktop and application environment (XenDesktop and XenApp) with BYOD support, concurrency licensing and centralized hosting. The rollout (for example, 90% virtual desktops at Age UK and 50% at Alzheimer’s Society) improved access and security, cut update and support costs (central updates were found to be 20× cheaper) and is projected to save about £15 million over five years while boosting productivity and business continuity.

Charityshare

Paul Mainstone

Citrix Architect