Azure Virtual Desktop helps Grant Thornton UK LLP solve business challenge

A decade ago, Grant Thornton began implementing a cloud-first strategy by migrating its human capital management solution to the cloud. The firm later deployed SharePoint, Exchange, and in 2018, Microsoft Teams. By the time COVID-19 struck in early 2020, most of the firm’s applications were in the cloud, including its time recording, practice management, learning management, and resourcing platforms.

“When the prime minister said in March 2020 that everybody would have to work from home, we didn’t have to make any changes,” says Greg Swift, Chief Information Officer at Grant Thornton UK LLP. “That wouldn’t have been possible if we weren’t already a cloud-first business.”

Cloud services keep the business up and running, even in a pandemic

The government-mandated lockdown posed several major hurdles for many businesses in the United Kingdom. Employees couldn’t return to their offices, and their devices had to be shipped to their homes. And after employees had their devices, companies needed to help people quickly and securely access their files and applications to continue working.

Fortunately, Grant Thornton barely missed a beat. With its subscription for Microsoft 365 E5, the firm had migrated nearly all its workloads to Microsoft 365 by early 2020. So, after receiving their existing firm-owned devices at home, employees could get back to supporting customers. Using Microsoft 365 and Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), employees had the files and applications they needed to support ongoing customer engagements. Equally important, the firm already had cloud-based controls in place, including multifactor authentication, to provide access to the right data and the right people only.

“Governance is critical,” explains Swift. “With Microsoft 365 and Azure AD, we’re able to balance empowering our people and providing the governance necessary to protect the firm.”

Around the same time, however, the firm needed to expand its number of auditors to effectively service the portfolio of audit engagements. It had to find a way to quickly onboard more audit teams. In other words, the firm needed to go beyond its four walls and create an innovative solution.

Flexible Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solves complex business challenges

Given COVID-19 restrictions, managing a new project would have to occur remotely without any UK employees onsite. The firm identified Grant Thornton India as having more than 50 available auditors that it could resource, but this presented the IT team with some significant technical obstacles.

“Our first challenge was how to provide these auditors with laptops and access to applications and platforms,” says Swift. “The next was preventing UK data from leaking to other employee devices. And finally, we had to make our solution easy for the auditors to use.” 

With a worldwide chip shortage taking place, buying and provisioning new laptops would be expensive and time-consuming. Connectivity and security were also issues. Tom Gilbert, Senior Infrastructure Manager at Grant Thornton UK LLP, wondered how his team could enable auditors in India to use his firm’s IT environment and auditing tools while securely passing data and large files across the network. “Going the traditional route of provisioning laptops and setting up a dedicated software-defined network would have taken a minimum of three months,” he explains. “We were aiming to get this done in four to six weeks, so we knew that we needed to do something different.”

That was when Grant Thornton looked at Azure Virtual Desktop. “We needed a solution we could spin up and use right away,” says Gilbert. “It had to be agile and not require a big cost outlay—ideally, pay as you go. Azure Virtual Desktop was an easy choice.”

Easy implementation and cost-efficient deployment

Andy Faulds, a Senior Infrastructure Analyst at Grant Thornton UK LLP, reached out to Azure engineering to understand how Virtual Desktop works and how to deploy and manage it. From an IT perspective, the team needed to know if Virtual Desktop would work in the field, and it needed to find out quickly.

“We had an individual in the Microsoft team we could contact any time,” says Faulds. “We met with him often, and as a result, we got instant answers to our questions without having to wait for things to happen.”

IT launched a small, one-week pilot, configuring Virtual Desktop and then asking several people to use it and try to break it. The pilot confirmed that the auditing tool worked despite being a resource-heavy application that still needs to run a local version of SQL Server. The team then had to decide whether to use a multi-session Azure Virtual Desktop experience or a single-assigned desktop based on cost efficiency. “At the end of the week, we had the confidence to say that Azure Virtual Desktop was the right choice,” says Gilbert.

The IT team was quickly ready to go live with the solution. Using multifactor authentication in Azure AD to control employees’ access to UK data, auditors in India easily connected with Virtual Desktop with their firm-owned laptops.

“It was very straightforward,” says Gilbert. “As soon as employees sign in, they forget they’re in a virtual environment. Because the experience is the same as working locally, you don’t need a substantial training investment.”

Virtual Desktop supports an elastic workforce, cost savings, and security

Although only 50 auditors outside the United Kingdom were initially assigned to the project, the number swelled to 160 auditors within two months of going live, including 15 employees from Grant Thornton Philippines. Despite the rapid escalation in staffing, the UK firm didn’t require any additional infrastructure investments.

“With Azure Virtual Desktop, we saved more than £1,000 per person when you consider the potential cost of securing laptops, configuring them, and shipping them overseas,” says Swift. 

Gilbert concurs, noting that Grant Thornton member firms don’t all have the same systems or use the same infrastructure. “By using Virtual Desktop, we don’t have to invest in adding new firewalls, configuring firewall rules, or resourcing engineers. And we save money on software-defined network connectivity from the security side.”

Initially, the firm was concerned about data leakage, especially the possibility of UK subject data appearing on devices in India. With Virtual Desktop, however, the IT team can turn off employees’ ability to copy, paste, and print data in UK files or applications, thus helping to ensure that data isn’t exposed.

“The best way I can describe Azure Virtual Desktop security is, ‘We have it,’” says Gilbert. “It’s all there, and it’s contained—that’s the key thing for us.” Swift agrees, adding, “We know it worked because we had people in India tell us.”

Most importantly, Grant Thornton proved that even in a difficult year, it could not only meet but exceed the expectations of its customers and the firm’s leadership. “Azure Virtual Desktop contributed to Grant Thornton achieving record results,” concludes Swift. “We couldn’t have done this given our capacity and limitations around COVID-19. Virtual Desktop helped us overcome major business challenges and meet customer filing deadlines.”

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