With flexible hybrid work arrangements increasing, this MNC digitalized with VDI

The corporation’s cloud-native virtual desktop infrastructure has helped ease workers used to rigid working styles to adapt better to flexible work.

A large corporation in Japan with more than 34,000 employees has turned to high-performance virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) in the Cloud to enable workers to adopt flexible work styles and achieve increased productivity.

With core businesses in energy; power transmission and distribution; information and telecommunications; and lifestyle and business solutions, the firm—The Kansai Electric Power Co., Inc (KEPCO)—is taking major steps toward digital transformation via one of the world’s largest VDI environments running on Microsoft 365 and Box.

In the era of hybrid-working, the aim is to drive digital work style innovation that enables flexible work styles and increased productivity across the firm’s various social infrastructures and services.

According to Akinori Kawai from the firm’s Information and Communications Engineering Group, Office of IT Strategy: “We now have an environment where we can communicate and collaborate smoothly, no matter where our employees are: in the office, on the road, or at home. We feel we have been able to steadily improve both our productivity as well as user convenience. I think the most significant achievement is that our high-performance VDI environment has enabled us to work in a flexible way, something almost impossible to imagine before. In the next stage, we would like to consider using the cloud as a disaster recovery countermeasure. “

Kawai said the solution by Nutanix has brought about a change in work styles: online meetings have become more flexible, facilitating effective information-sharing and decision-making. Employees that have shifted to remote-working have also improved their productivity significantly when choosing a flexible work style. In addition, KEPCO has reduced the substantial operational efforts needed to replicate virtual machines: from 20min down to a few seconds.

Factors involved in the choice of this platform included: simplicity and ease of operation; ability to expand and update without disruptions; cost savings; performance; reliability and availability; and ability to operate stably and safely in a large-scale environment with automatic update functions.