Provide a brief description of the Solution or Service provided.
As details of the recent G20 Summit were being made available to the public, Gibraltar Solutions quickly realized the event would be a major force of disruption for many of our clients with offices in Downtown Toronto or by Pearson Airport. Gibraltar recognized early on that most, if not all businesses cannot afford to experience any downtime, so we created a secure solution to help organizations seamlessly and securely transition their operations outside of these affected areas. Working closely with Citrix, we created the Gibraltar Extreme Event Preparedness Solution to enable clients to remain unaffected by the G20 Summit and related disruptions.
Describe what made your Service of the highest quality. Provide evidence of how the service benefited the customer’s business, e.g. measurable improvements in sales, revenues, cost reduction, productivity, lost time due to outage, etc.
Gibraltar’s Extreme Event Preparedness Solution is a proven cost-effective set of technologies that are simple to manage and quick to deploy. Utilizing the latest technology from Citrix (XenApp, XenDesktop and NetScaler), the solution was designed to be deployed in two days with zero interruption to the business. We used XenApp to virtualize applications for delivery and NetScaler for remote access and load balancing of local and global servers. In choosing XenApp, we opted for the proven ICA protocol because of its smaller footprint on the network. We felt a smaller network footprint is critical since it would support a larger number of concurrent users and thus a higher ROI. In addition to being a secured application access solution, we also used NetScaler to optimize local and global server load balancing to optimize network performance. The solution was a great success as adoption rate was very high amongst Gibraltar’s clients. The solution was deployed to help some of Canada’s largest Financial Institutions, Law firms and medium sized accounting firms to mitigate the risks posed by G20. In one specific scenario faced with tax deadlines for hundreds of important clients, a mid sized accounting firm had zero room for error or downtime. With Gibraltar’s support, they co-located and experienced none of the anticipated problems. Business continued as usual while sensitive client data remained under virtual lock and was never at risk of exposure. Furthermore, employee’s safety was never comprised as a result of implementing Gibraltar’s Extreme Event Preparedness Solution.
Describe how services were delivered in a timely fashion and/or how response to a crisis was over and above the accepted norm?
Gibraltar developed a three-phase approach to fast deployment of the Extreme Event Preparedness Solution: 1. Assessment: We analyzed the client’s environment to identify business process and infrastructure gaps 2. Virtualization: We worked with each client to virtualize their environment and software applications for improved availability and accessibility 3. Secured Remote Access: Installed the appropriate secured Remote Access Solution and allowed users to access application and computing resources from anywhere at any time with any device over any wired or wireless network In summary, we used XenApp to virtualize applications for delivery and NetScaler as a secure remote access and load balancing device.
Describe how your services go beyond competitors to satisfy the needs of your customer(s). Provide examples or evidence of how your services are the better and why.
As Ontario’s pioneer and leading virtualization solution provider, Gibraltar is known in the industry as an Innovator and an exceptional service provider because we anticipate client’s needs. Our Extreme Event Preparedness Solution is a prime example of this. We anticipated the disruptive potential of the G20 Summit and worked diligently to develop a timely and cost effective solution for our clients. Because of our innovative solution, 25,000 people around the Greater Toronto Area experienced zero business interruption during the G20 Summit. Here are some of the positive feedback we received from end users of customers (note that we can’t provide name and company information because of NDAs): “The new RAS is awesome! I had no problems during the week of the G20 at all! It was a better and faster site! Job well done” “It’s great to see these kudos for our technology partners. I’ve seen first hand the complexities they need to deal with to make things work. Often their efforts go unnoticed until something breaks. Then they get a whole lot of attention – just not the best kind. – Clearly the team did a great job – well done…and thank you” “Job well executed! I tried out the G20 RAS the week before the big launch and have been a huge fan ever since. Congratulations. I love the look and the speed is amazing”
