Leading U.S. integrated care provider ensures success for remote workers

SHI stands up Proof of Concept for 2,000 Amazon WorkSpaces.

Challenge:

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted millions of individuals and businesses across the globe, creating the ‘new norm’ for remote work. This leading U.S. provider of hospital staffing and administration services was no exception.

One of the largest integrated care providers in the country – with over 16,000 clinicians – needed to explore remote work options for their essential staff during COVID-19, especially for employees still utilizing traditional desktop workstations.

Senior leadership requested help from their IT support team to provide a Proof of Concept (PoC) for 2,000 Amazon WorkSpaces to quickly scale virtual desktop instances while ensuring network connectivity to corporate networks – and allowing user access to critical business applications.

With minimum exposure to Amazon WorkSpaces, the customer needed help creating a self-service portal that would offer a highly secure and compliant configuration and deployment.

Solution:

SHI’s AWS architects became an extension of the customer’s IT support team, standing up a six-instance PoC into their internal Active Directory, integrating their Okta system for SSO, and configuring internal applications. Our team also created a base bundle using Amazon’s Performance bundle plus Microsoft Office to install and test critical applications, which would be used as the baseline Workspaces bundle to deploy at scale after the PoC approval.

SHI designed a solution leveraging their Samanage Ticketing system, AWS API Gateway, Lambda, SES for email creation, Okta, and Amazon WorkSpaces – creating an automated process to request, approve, and deploy their Amazon WorkSpaces instances.

Solution components included:

• Integration with Samanage ticketing system using AWS cross account roles, with Samanage’s AWS client access integration.
• AWS API Gateway integration with a Lambda function to create a WorkSpaces request email, tagging it for approval from the user’s manager.
• AWS SES integration to send the email from Samanage to the user and to track the response through the Lambda function to either deny or approve the process.
• Upon approval completion, a second Lambda function was triggered to create an Okta-enabled WorkSpaces from their baseline WorkSpaces bundle, issuing the WorkSpaces email with their registration key and login information, and creating a temporary and secure link for the user to download the Amazon WorkSpaces client.

Outcome:

SHI built out the baseline bundle and integrated it with local Active Directory and Okta. Deploying the bundle to the remaining five instances eliminated future issues with a larger deployment.

Along with the successful PoC integration, we removed the burden of manually creating WorkSpaces instances, including drafting individual emails to managers and waiting for a response.

The customer provided work-from-home employees with a link to the Samanage login, enabling them to request access to WorkSpaces and utilize their newly created virtual desktop instance.