Reference story - SNS Reaal - Insurance and Banking
SNS Reaal belongs to the top 5 top banks in the Netherlands and with around 9000 employees it is also one of the Netherlands’ larger bank insurers. Its centralized IT department is kept busy administering the company’s workspaces.
SNS Reaal’s strategy places the emphasis firmly on accessibility and empowering its customers to do things independently. Services are being increasingly presented online and in the new SNS ‘shops’ that are opening, PCs with touch screens are available to visitors. When it comes to advice however, SNS customers can still count on the staff in the shops as well as an extensive network of advisors that travel across the country. What used to be the office can now be found on the consultant’s laptop. It is the job of IT to make all this possible which it why it has chosen RES PowerFuse.
The project and the requirements
Jan van Kooten, head of the Workspace Services department, explains how IT goes hand in hand with SNS Reaal’s strategy. “At the start of 2009, the time was ripe for investing in new technology that would make mobile working viable. After all, the project was crucial for implementing the company’s strategy. From 2002 thru 2005, we in the IT department had already invested in the construction of our own ‘workspace’, using mainly scripts. However it became increasingly difficult to guarantee data security; an absolutely essential prerequisite if we were to be successful. Advisors who travel across the country with their laptops must be able to access applications and data at all times, with the settings they are used to, and yet this access must be constantly managed and remain within the security rules. Our existing solution only permitted us to offer ‘all or nothing’: either you were given access to the entire environment, or you were utterly limited. Consequently, we found ourselves unable to facilitate the flexibility we expected from our advisors.
PQR, one of RES Software’s Platinum partners which had been a trusted advisor of SNS Reaal’s for several years, carried out an analysis with us into the best approach and advised us to try the RES PowerFuse user workspace delivery solution. A test environment was soon set up and positive results were noticed right away.”
Expansion: The New Way of Working for all SNS Reaal
At the same time as ‘Tooling Advice’, the IT project relating to the mobile advisors, ‘The New Way of Working’ was also on IT’s list of priorities. SNS Reaal not only encourages its advisors to be flexible, but its entire staff. The @Home project profited from the experience gained by testing RES PowerFuse. This resulted in the existing ‘workspace’ now being replaced by RES PowerFuse.
The benefits of RES PowerFuse
Van Kooten explains with due pride what a difference RES PowerFuse is making within the organization and how it plays a key role in The New Way of Working. “Soon, when we are able to phase out our ‘old’ environment entirely, RES PowerFuse is going to bring us numerous cost and administration benefits. We have also had the first spontaneous reactions from some of our staff, which is rather special because usually people only comment on IT when they have something to complain about. The advisors are delighted with the service we are now providing them with. Login times have been shortened and as we are now able to check more details, we offer them more freedom than ever before. Furthermore, we are seeing a huge rise in home working.”
Benefits to administration:
“RES PowerFuse is intuitive and therefore easy to learn to use. Soon we will have enough with two fewer administrators for SNS Reaal’s entire workspace administration. Moreover, we are removing a lot of risk since complex scripts are only known to the people who wrote them. Once those people leave the company, the scripts become useless,” says Van Kooten.
- ROI and cost saving:
Van Kooten continues: “We save a huge amount on hardware because we are able to make better use of our Citrix XenApp servers’ capacity. Performance Manager in RES PowerFuse takes care of this but, what’s more, the way in which we present the user workspace using RES PowerFuse makes us far more efficient. To be precise, we can now use one server to serve several groups of employees that each have specific requirements. Previously for instance, we had a separate environment for the intermediaries in order to safeguard information. Now, however, RES PowerFuse enables us to compose various workspaces from a single pool of workspace components (data, applications and settings). This means the principle of ‘all or nothing’ is a thing of the past.” Speed also plays a role when it comes to making savings: “Running the scripts that are now making way for RES PowerFuse sometimes used to mean that it took five or six minutes for your work environment to appear on your PC. The bigger the script, the slower the PC. Now however, we have reduced this to half a minute, making us considerably more productive.”
- Security:
The greatest benefit RES PowerFuse brings is security. We are able to set security rules at all levels, which means we have a better grip on the environment and how it is used. This for me is the primary reason for recommending RES PowerFuse to fellow organizations: security is key.”
- Support:
Van Kooten is also very impressed with RES Software support. “During the implementation process, they worked hard on building in the extra functionality that is so important to us. That goes way beyond that you might expect from a support department. For example, we requested an additional USB stick control feature as we only want to authorize those USB sticks that we ourselves have flagged as being safe. By adding a product & vendor ID to the identification function, we can now do this very easily. We have also found that the support department responds very quickly if any problems occur.”
The future
Jan van Kooten is confident about the future: “RES PowerFuse puts us in a position of being able to quickly introduce changes ourselves without the need for scripts or the intervention of consultants.” The challenge facing us for the next few months is preparing all our staff to become mobile and flexible by using RES PowerFuse. SNS Reaal will then be able to phase out its existing environment completely and really profit from the total benefits.
We've had the first spontaneous reactions from some of our staff, which is rather special. The advisors are delighted with the service we are now providing them with.
Jan van Kooten, Head of Workspace Services Department, Netherlands