Fujitsu is the winner of the 2017 Citrix Innovation Award for Partners.
With the award, Citrix recognizes Fujitsu for delivering a Desktop as a Service solution to the New Zealand government in just four days after a major earthquake cut off access to its IT infrastructure.
Fujitsu’s Government Desktop as a Service (GoDaaS) is a cloud-based solution that enables secure access to critical applications and is currently being deployed by over 3,000 users at four major New Zealand government agencies. Built as a hybrid cloud solution on one of the most sophisticated multi-tenanted Citrix architectures and XenApp and XenDesktop deployments in the world, GoDaaS lets users work from anywhere, anytime, providing a seamless user experience across any end device via traditional or virtual desktops.
Statistics New Zealand, the government agency charged with collecting and producing statistical information, was at the start of a planned six-month GoDaaS rollout when a massive 7.8-scale earthquake hit New Zealand in November 2016, causing catastrophic damage to its head office.
Although the earthquake cut off all physical access to Statistics New Zealand’s IT systems, Fujitsu was able to deliver an entire desktop and office productivity environment to the agency’s 1,000-plus workforce in the space of just four days.
Thanks to GoDaaS, Statistics employees could work from home during the weeks of aftershocks that followed, enabling them to meet a critical deadline for publishing key economic statistics.
In the submission video for the Citrix Innovation Award, Christoper Buxton, Chief Digital Officer of Statistics New Zealand described the value of the cloud-based GoDaaS platform: “Ultimately we are a data agency, so our value add is data. We are providing data to our customers including businesses or individuals. At the end of the day we serve the entire population of New Zealand and the cloud helps us to put this data in the hands of those users.”
Stuart Stitt, MD of Fujitsu New Zealand, says: “GoDaaS is delivering multiple benefits to the New Zealand government, including the ability to scale up quickly to support the national census, streamlining the justice system, improving security, and reducing running costs for IT.”