Hand and Millar (H&M) hit the ground running, putting in place a rationalisation approach to bring demand and compute power back into alignment. While part of this approach involved managing demand, the other half was about increasing compute power. H&M led a team of civil servants, suppliers, and consultancy professionals to design, pilot, and roll out a Virtual Desktop solution. This would provide departmental and contractor users with access to workplace tools without the need for a department-issued device.

 

H&M led the development and creation of this product from initial concept through to build, testing, and live operation. From the start, H&M required that the virtual desktop solution should:

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• make use of existing licence capability

• be built to scale to many tens of thousands of concurrent users

• and have security baked in from the ground up.

 

H&M championed Secure by Design for the virtual desktop product, ensuring that the solution’s security was central to the entire initiative and always the first consideration in any decisions about the solution. This approach to security was particularly important because many senior stakeholders were sceptical about whether a virtual desktop would prove secure enough for the organisation's needs.

 

H&M’s skilful stakeholder management ensured cross-business-area and senior stakeholder buy-in for the solution at every step of the way. H&M adopted a posture of complete transparency in the face of critical questions, always providing stakeholders with the facts and information needed to proactively demonstrate the Secure By Design focus.

 

H&M were so successful in this approach that internal authorities praised the programme as an exemplar for how Secure by Design should be done. Repeated security and penetration testing of the finished product has established the virtual desktop solution's resilience.