A bank's desktop estate, re-platformed to Azure, ~39% lower cost

A bank's desktops are where compliance, security and productivity meet, and where cost quietly piles up. This regional bank ran its entire branch and back-office estate on an on-prem VMware Horizon VDI that was expensive, manual and difficult to secure. Periscope made the business case for Azure Virtual Desktop, proved it in a hands-on PoC, and designed the migration.

The Challenge

The existing VDI worked, but every part of it added cost or risk, and none of it was documented or automated:

1. 01

   One rigid golden image, rebuilt on every logoff. A single image served every role, and virtual machines were destroyed and rebuilt each time a user logged off, wasting compute and making users wait for their profiles.

2. 02

   Manual patching, no test environment. OS and app updates meant recreating desktops from the golden image, and all testing happened in production, slow, costly and dangerous.

3. 03

   A hard-to-secure, undocumented estate. Unaudited network shares, group policies more than double the number of users, multiple undocumented AD domains, no logging, no real-time monitoring and no automation left the environment exposed to threats and human error.

The bank didn't just need lower cost, it needed an estate it could patch, test, monitor and audit, with security built in rather than discovered after the fact. The engagement brief

The Solution

Periscope designed a migration to Azure Virtual Desktop, multi-session desktops from per-role golden images, managed and secured through Microsoft Intune, monitored in real time, and delivered through automated, documented environments. It was proven first in a hands-on proof of concept.

Per-role golden images. Azure Compute Gallery holds multiple, version-controlled, replicated images, so tellers, branch managers and back-office staff each get the right, individually configured desktop.

Multi-session, auto-scaling desktops. Azure Virtual Desktop delivers pooled multi-session Windows plus personal desktops, auto-scaling capacity to demand and office hours to control cost, reachable from any device.

Cloud endpoint management & security. Microsoft Intune automates policy, app and OS deployment, with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint providing real-time risk analysis and automated remediation.

Monitoring, logging & automation. Azure Monitor gives real-time visibility and dashboards, image build/deploy/scale/patch is automated, and a centralized Azure file share replaces unaudited network shares.

Tested, documented, de-risked. Separate Sandbox, Beta and Production environments and detailed documentation replaced production-only testing and tribal knowledge.

The Results

Moving off aging on-prem VDI to a modern, automated Azure estate cut cost sharply while making the environment more secure and far easier to run.

~39% lower 3-year TCO. Consolidating hardware, licensing and maintenance into Azure was projected to cut the three-year total cost of ownership by roughly 39%, over $1.6M in savings.

Cost that scales with use. Multi-session shared VMs, reserved capacity and office-hours auto-scaling drive cost down further, and Windows licensing rides on the existing Microsoft 365 subscription.

Hardened, auditable security. Real-time monitoring, logging, Defender-based threat response and documented policies replaced an exposed, undocumented estate.

Faster to run and grow. Automated imaging and patching cut manual effort, onboarding is template-driven, and staff work securely from any device, anywhere.

From a fragile, manual on-prem VDI to a secure, automated Azure estate, roughly 39% lower cost, monitored, documented, and proven in a successful PoC first. Outcome summary