Telenet/SBS, Mediahuis, Proximus/Skynet and Pebble Media launched a joint national advertising agency under the name Ads & Data as of April 1, 2021. Together these companies own an extensive portfolio of television and radio channels, as well as digital and print media. Employees of the new Ads & Data needed to have access to files and applications spread across servers owned by Telenet/SBS and De Vijver Media, among others. At a White Raven IT event, Carlo Grauwels (COE Lead Digital Workspace) learned about Awingu, which is now being used to combine access to those IT environments through one secure workspace.
Benefits
- Consolidating separate IT stacks: “Ads & Data is a new company with a new IT stack, but the employees will initially all still come from the merger partners. So we were looking for a way to give access to different parts of those ‘old’ environments, within one workplace,” says Carlo. A lot of the applications running at Telenet and De Vijver Media are programs they wrote themselves, so virtualizing legacy applications was a must. During the search and setup, they had two main requirements: usability and security.
- Simplicity: Ease of use is also a plus for administrators: the rather complex setup that involved bringing together different environments and user groups within one Awingu environment took a week from installation to completion of testing. “There was a short lead time to get everything up and running. So speed was really a must, and I don’t think we could get started at such a pace with any other solution.” Sustainability also plays a role: now that Awingu has proven its strength for this use-case, it will continue to run for a long time and not be replaced. “So we are really using Awingu as a ‘workstation’, and not as a solution to temporarily facilitate this ‘merger’.”
- Security: Ads & Data’s data must be shielded at all costs from anyone who should not have explicit access to it. “Before we onboard tools, they go through an extensive security assessment process. Our cybersecurity team has a lot of rigorous parameters and tests ready to go to which any new solution is subject, and Awingu passed with distinction. ”The administrative staff and sales people who use Awingu at Ads & Data log into their environment securely via the browser. This can be done on any device – A&D currently provides managed devices for its employees, but that is not a requirement. Once logged in, they have access to a range of file servers (spread across the parent companies) and virtualized applications (idem).
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