MEC Canada

Creating Workplace Flexibility and Secure Remote Operations at MEC using Windows Virtual Desktop

Using Invero’s Azure expertise, Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC Canada) enabled secure and productive remote work in the face of COVID-19.
MEC Canada is a leading outdoor recreation retailer and most trusted brand, with a social purpose - investing $44 million and more into non-profit organizations.
Headquarters:  Vancouver, BC, Canada
Number of Locations: :  20 stores in Canada
Using Invero’s Azure expertise, Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC Canada) enabled secure and productive remote work in the face of COVID-19.
MEC Canada is a leading outdoor recreation retailer and most trusted brand, with a social purpose - investing $44 million and more into non-profit organizations.
Headquarters:  Vancouver, BC, Canada
Number of Locations: :  20 stores in Canada

THE CHALLENGE

Rapidly Deliver a Secure Virtualized Experience to Remote Teams

With the global pandemic, retailers are relying on remote work more than ever, and Windows Virtual Desktop is helping them rapidly deliver a secure Windows 10 desktop experience to their teams.

In this challenge, MEC needed to increase agility and scale to meet the changing requirements and address continuity issues. So, MEC needed a digital solution to allow them to:

  • Provide the best “in-office” culture as they could to a 2,000-person workforce. The workforce comprises corporate staff and frontline retail team in stores and warehouses. Now, they are working away from their offices and stores.
  • Multiply their past remote computing capacity almost overnight. Though, that’s only possible with a scalable and cloud-based approach.
  • Simplify foundation management and quickly scale based on business cycles.
  • Keep data secure and compliant and proactively detect threats to take action on.
  • Use existing licenses to save costs and reduce the administrative burden on operational teams.

THE SOLUTION

Connect Securely to MEC’s Enterprise Experience with Windows Virtual Desktop

Our Approach
  • Using project management principles, deploy Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) as a desktop and app virtualization service running in Azure to provide a consistent and secure virtualized experience for employees.
  • Integrate applications—such as call centre software—enabling call centre employees to work remotely and continue to manage customer orders during a retail boom. This approach also enabled redeploying store staff as call center representatives when they were not able to work in the stores.
  • Free up critical IT resources by reducing the amount of far-reaching physical infrastructure to manage and automating updates
  • Provide documentation and training to set the team up for long-term success.
Technology Used
  • Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD)
  • Azure Virtual Machines
  • Windows 10 Multi-User
  • Azure DevOps
  • Azure Functions
  • FSLogix
  • Terraform
  • Azure Log Analytics
  • Azure VPN
  • Azure Sentinel

THE RESULTS

Ability to Scale for Peak Periods and Reduced IT Costs for the Co-op

Cost Control

By leveraging the cloud, MEC avoided the high price of purchasing, owning and operating on-premises hardware to extend their environment—which can sometimes be as much as four times the cost of initial purchase or 75% of a company’s total IT budget (Gartner, 2011). The cloud model enables its users to access applications anywhere and anytime, delivering greater productivity and profitability.

Make the Most of Existing Licensing

MEC capitalized on existing Microsoft 365 licensing to save costs with a modern cloud-based virtual desktop infrastructure and only pay for what they needed to use at any given time; thereby allowing the greatest flexibility with the least up front investment. Windows Virtual Desktop is a free service and can be used with your existing Microsoft 365 or Windows per-user license.

Reduce Management Overhead

Invero helped MEC move all of its virtual desktop infrastructure into a managed service in the cloud, enabling them to scale their operations, proactively monitor usage and issues, and automate security patching. As an added benefit, they are also now better prepared to deploy staff where they are needed most during peak sales periods and holiday shopping.

David Greekas
Senior Solutions Architect

We substantially automated the process of updating and deploying WVD Pool system images. Our WVD pools are also now dynamic and auto-scale with the number of users active on the system and fully shut down at night. This is a significantly more cost-efficient configuration than running the servers 24/7.