British Energy turns to AppSense to personalize the user environment

British Energy Group’s large operations and international reputation require certain groups of employees to work remotely, managing overseas projects or travelling around the country to business meetings. However, restricted by extensive legislation from the Office of Civil and Nuclear Security (OCNS), British Energy was unable to provide remote access to business applications such as Microsoft Office or Oracle systems. The inability to access applications remotely impacted on British Energy’s productivity and market response times and with a new CEO on board, the IT department was tasked with finding a way to provide remote access, while complying with the essential security legislation. From an initial VPN pilot, which quickly proved to be too clunky for use, they turned to Citrix. It delivered the remote access needed and sailed through OCNS accreditation. However, the Citrix environment brought its own challenges. British Energy had trouble with roaming profiles corrupting, requiring frequent resetting. Additionally, with all applications now running within Citrix, British Energy was struggling to control access policies and the servers were not able to allocate resources appropriately. With over 800 remote users on 125 Citrix servers, it only takes one user accessing one resource intensive application and complaints arise about slow logon times and interrupted application sessions. The final problem was that within Citrix, all users had standardized desktop sessions, meaning all employees working within Citrix have access to the same applications, not allowing users to personalize their desktop session in any way.

British Energy Group is the largest producer of electricity in the UK and has built a reputation for operating one of the most reliable nuclear reactors in the world. The company is responsible for providing one sixth of the country’s energy via its eight nuclear power stations and one coal–fired plant. With 6,000 employees across the UK, British Energy is a FTSE100 company. The company’s large operations and international reputation require certain groups of employees to work remotely, managing overseas projects or travelling around the country to business meetings. However, restricted by extensive legislation from the Office of Civil and Nuclear Security (OCNS), British Energy was unable to provide remote access to business applications such as Microsoft Office or Oracle systems. This inability to access applications remotely impacted on British Energy’s productivity and market response times.