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Modernizing Financial Services with Virtual Desktops:
How Evolve IP’s Virtual Desktops, Powered by Citrix helps firms stay competitive, secure, and flexible in today’s evolving marketplace
The four business priorities impacting Financial Services:
Financial organizations are always trying to stay ahead of the competition. But today, four immediate industry trends are pressuring today’s firms to move forward quickly:
- Evolving customer expectations around innovative financial technology
- Competitive pressure from digital‑born fintech solutions
- Evolving security threats increasingly targeting the financial industry
- Transformed work models as employees stay remote or go hybrid The primary goal of any financial firm is to drive growth and profitability. But to do so, they will need to escape constraints of legacy systems with solutions that help them respond quickly to new priorities. Let’s take a closer look at each trend driving this change.
The primary goal of any financial firm is to drive growth and profitability. But to do so, they will need to escape constraints of legacy systems with solutions that help them respond quickly to new priorities. Let’s take a closer look at each trend driving this change.
Evolving customer expectations in financial services
It’s no secret that today’s customers want more information, more access, more options, and more autonomy. Today, customers expect even the most traditional financial firms to have tech‑forward solutions that allow them to manage their products and services in real time, make decisions based on data-driven insights, and stay protected from security threats. Because technology has become the linchpin of consumer life, there’s no excuse for financial firms to fall behind in providing the customer‑facing solutions the market demands. In an increasingly competitive financial service marketplace, customers can easily take their business elsewhere, making their needs a priority.
Customers expect even the most traditional financial firms to have tech‑forward solutions that help them manage products and services in real time.
Competitive pressure from tech‑forward fintechs
Fintech solutions are changing the industry with born-digital products responsible for evolving customer expectations. This means that even the most traditional financial firms are expected to keep pace with their more digitally agile competition, which can be difficult with legacy systems. To increase agility in the fast-moving financial services market, firms need a technology infrastructure designed to support modern development practices that incorporate microservices, APIs, and DevOps. They also need to ensure employees can access the resources they need more quickly and efficiently in this ultra-competitive environment.
Firms need a technology infrastructure designed to support modern development practices.
The weight of cybercrime and compliance
With the explosion of data, applications, remote users, mobile devices, and bring‑your‑own‑device (BYOD) capabilities in financial services, security risks have soared. Banks and other financial services firms have become prime targets for cybercrime for obvious reasons, appearing as malware, phishing, ransomware, and more.
Regulators also have financial institutions in their sights as well, enforcing mandates and standards including GDPR, PCI‑DSS, and GLBA. To ensure compliance without impeding business, firms must keep data secure with zero-trust best practices while enabling employees with access the data and systems they rely on, wherever and however they’re working.
Firms must keep data secure with zero‑trust best practices to ensure compliance without impeding business.
New workstyles and employee expectations in the financial industry
Hybrid and remote work have evolved into a new norm and financial firms need comprehensive solutions that seamlessly enable a heterogeneous, globally-distributed workforce. Whether it serves traders who need high-speed connectivity, quantitative analysts who need computing capacity, or retail branch workers who need responsive platforms that deliver insights for customers, these solutions need to support collaboration and innovation beyond the physical workspace.
As hybrid and remote work become the new norm, firms need solutions to support collaboration and innovation beyond the physical workspace.
The opportunity for today’s financial services firms
Though financial services increasingly recognize the urgency of digital transformation, firms have been hesitant to migrate to the cloud often due to security and regulatory compliance concerns. This leaves many firms harnessed to their legacy technology and struggling to keep up with customers’ demand for innovation, challenged to stay competitive in a digital-first market, and scrambling to support a workforce that needs workspace and app responsiveness and performance from any location. So, what should financial firms prioritize to stay customer-centric, competitive, secure and flexible in today’s market?
Firms must keep data secure with zero‑trust best practices to ensure compliance without impeding business.
Evolve IP’s Virtual Desktops, Powered by Citrix for financial services
To compete in a rapidly changing market, today’s firms can both modernize infrastructure and leverage legacy infrastructure in a more flexible way, delivering the evolving experiences demanded by both customers and employees. Evolve IP’s Virtual Desktops, Powered by Citrix helps financial services firms:
Escape constraints of legacy infrastructure to become more agile and competitive in a digitally‑transforming industry
Meet employee expectations for more flexible work models without undermining security and compliance
Reduce risk by strengthening data protection and ensuring business continuity
Increase business agility
With Evolve IP’s Virtual Desktops, Powered by Citrix, financial services organizations can open new locations more quickly, consolidate branches, rapidly launch new product or service offerings, and accelerate the time to value of changes like mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures. VDI delivery and Desktops-as-a-Service (DaaS) help provision and manage employee resources in any location more easily, adapt readily to changing needs, and simplify IT operations.
Evolve IP’s Virtual Desktops, Powered by Citrix also enables new customer and employee rollouts more quickly, such as using tablets to get branch agents out from behind the counter to serve customers or enabling remote employees to securely use any device anywhere. Cloud services provide a fast, flexible deployment model for applications and services to accelerate innovation while reducing cost.
- Facilitates the shift from legacy on-premises systems to cloud environments, SaaS, and VDI
- Streamlines rollout of new products and better user experiences • Incorporates cloud resources to match organizational strategy and requirements
- Adapts and scales easily to meet changing business needs while keeping IT management simple and cost-efficient
- Accelerates the value of M&A, new locations, and branch consolidation by allowing IT to deliver applications and data anywhere, on any device, without the need to integrate legacy systems
171%
ROI with Citrix Evolve IP’s Virtual Desktops, Powered by Citrix1
15%
better employee productivity1
Nearly
$800K
in legacy hardware and software savings1
Reduce risk and boosting resiliency
Evolve IP’s Virtual Desktops, Powered by Citrix helps strengthen data protection to enable rapid recovery from security incidents for better business continuity. With sensitive apps and data secured centrally on-premises or in a highly secure public cloud platform, this solution helps safeguard sensitive information more effectively, enhance corporate security, respond to compliance mandates, and reduce a firm’s audit footprint. Also, as remote and hybrid work moves beyond the firewall, Evolve IP’s Virtual Desktops, Powered by Citrix can modernize security to better protect distributed employees, applications, devices, and networks by encrypting data in-motion, restricting data sharing, and wiping data from mobile devices for better security and compliance. Security analytics also deliver actionable insights to detect and deflect potential threats before they impact customers and employees.
- Supports a zero-trust model for access to virtual, SaaS, internal web apps, and more
- Provides a consistent security posture for all applications and APIs across multi‑cloud environments to protect the entire landscape
- Reduces attack surfaces by storing sensitive data in the data center rather than endpoints
- Secures BYOD and COPE (corporate-owned personally-enabled) endpoints without undermining security and compliance
- Safeguards against threats with proactive, AI-powered threat detection and mitigation to identify anomalies in user behavior, outside threats, or endpoint issues
- Recover quickly from security incidents and disasters
Deliver a better hybrid work experience
Evolve IP’s Virtual Desktops, Powered by Citrix helps financial organizations provide flexible work options and secure anytime, anywhere access to business resources. From relationship managers and personal bankers to roaming branch staff and loan agents. Evolve IP’s Virtual Desktops, Powered by Citrix helps employees access applications, information, and data on a single aggregated workspace without putting sensitive data at risk. This solution also helps speed up customer service, help desk, and call center response times with a secure, high-performance, and reliable computing environment on laptops and desktop PCs. With Evolve IP’s Virtual Desktops, Powered by Citrix, firms can adopt zero‑trust best practices with modern application delivery and secure access technology, and ensure a consistent user experience with SD-WAN and actionable network analytics.
- Helps attract and engage skilled staff with flexible work options and secure access
- Enables employees to use BYOD and COPE devices without compromising sensitive client or personal information
- Provides single sign-on (SSO) access for zero-trust best practices
- Ensures a high-quality user experience on any network (including high‑latency networks) and helps IT teams quickly detect, diagnose, and remediate performance issues
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Take a look at our frequently asked questions around Virtual Desktops.
Desktop-as-a-Service is a cloud computing solution that provides employees with secure remote access to all of their applications, files and data from any location, at any time. The data is stored safely in a public/ private cloud and can be accessed on nearly any internet-enabled ‘smart’ device. Desktop as a Service, formerly known as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) consolidates all external IT assets and legacy/SaaS applications into one platform to simplify IT administration. Each user is provided with a dedicated CPU and memory allowing them to work exactly as they would with a traditional laptop or desktop, often with improved performance, better security and seamless user experience.
- Access company data and apps securely from any where
- Simplify IT by offloading maintenance and administrative headaches
- Work from any location with any type of end-point device
- Reduce your security exposure
- Reduce hardware and support costs
- Replace siloed, legacy infrastructure with a consolidated solution that simplifies IT
- Speed up used on boarding and offboarding
- Eliminate the need to refresh hardware every few years
- Eliminate the need for VPN
- Ensure reliability with 99.999% uptime
- Maximize business continuity with disaster recovery
- Stay secure by keeping up with compliance and regulatory standards
Instead of waiting until the last moment for another hardware refresh, exploring DaaS early on can improve the way you approach tech challenges. DaaS offers more than just device replacement—it extends device lifecycles, enhances security, boosts mobility, and improves end-user productivity, ultimately leading to a better customer experience. By having the conversation about DaaS well in advance, organizations can discover its potential beyond a simple hardware substitute.
- Extend a customers’ network into the data center solution
- Build out DaaS tenant
- Getting the image ready
- Installing applications
- Add licensing
Not only does DaaS offer a significant reduction in support costs—up to 60% for user bases leveraging VDI or DaaS compared to traditional client computing solutions—it also simplifies administrative tasks. By eliminating the need for device procurement and provisioning, DaaS simplifies organizational dynamics and cuts costs.
Evolve IP’s managed DaaS delivers the technology, support, management, and expertise needed to fully embrace hybrid work – in our cloud or on Azure. It enables IT to offload their day-to-day administrative headaches of managing a virtual desktop infrastructure to Evolve IP so they can focus on more strategic tasks.
Desktop-as-a-Service provides multiple business benefits:
- Dramatically improve employee productivity by providing immediate access to all company apps from any location, on any type of device
- Enable mobility and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategies
- Improve data, device, and application security because data never leaves the data center and stays safe in Evolve IP’s cloud.
- Better manageability due to centralized administration i.e. quickly upgrade applications across the network, push patches etc.
- Eradicate PC / laptop repair time and expense
- Extend the life of desktop infrastructure, workstations, and laptops
- Eliminates the need for additional staffing/support costs
- Reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by transitioning away from expensive on-site servers, data centers and hardware.
No, if you are currently contracted with Microsoft for your Windows Desktop Operating System you can leverage the Windows VDA (Virtual Desktop Access) for your licensing. Learn more about our Desktop as a Service Pricing here.
Use Case | Common For | Best Choice |
High Availability | Critical Workloads, Large Enterprises | DaaS |
Seasonal Workers / Bust Capacity | Retail, Finance | DaaS |
Small Worker Footprint | SMB Enterprise | PC or DaaS |
Bring Your Own PC (BYOD) | Contractors, Gig Workers | VDI or DaaS |
Single / Multiple Desk-Based Locations | Physicians, Floor Managers | VDI or DaaS |
High Security and Compliance | Financial Traders, IT, Government | VDI or DaaS |
Numerous Legacy Windows App | Healthcare, Governments, Finance | VDI or DaaS |
High-Turnover Positions | Interns, Contractors, Educators | VDI or DaaS |
High End Graphics | CAD Engineers, GIS, Graphic Design | PC or DaaS |
Shared Computers | Hospitals, Manufacturing | VDI or DaaS |
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DaaS (Desktop as a Service):
- Cloud-based service.
- Managed by a third-party provider.
- Highly scalable and subscription-based.
- Suitable for organizations prioritizing simplicity and scalability.
VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure):
- On-premises or private cloud solution.
- Requires more in-house management.
- Upfront hardware costs.
- Provides more control and customization options.
In short, DaaS is a cloud-based, scalable, and managed service, while VDI offers more control but demands in-house management and infrastructure investment.
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