Ushiku City Adopts Nutanix for Remote Work Environment and Security Measures for
Employees

Thin client environment based on Nutanix Cloud Platform ensures security and reduces the Digital Promotion Department’s workload by a quarter

Overview

Ushiku City, located in the southern part of Ibaraki Prefecture, is on its digital transformation journey as part of a nationwide drive. After adopting Nutanix, Ushiku City can achieve both remote work flexibility as well as ensure and maintain strict security for all their information systems.

Key Results

Challenge

Ushiku City, located in the southern part of Ibaraki Prefecture, boasts a high citizen satisfaction rate of 90.3%, with convenient access to the city center, abundant nature, and commercial facilities. With digital transformation (DX) being sought by local governments nationwide, Ushiku City is now seeking to become a “city of the future” by April 2022. Ushiku City has since started preparations for the full-scale introduction of its DX strategy, including a system development survey and identification of operations, led by the Digital Promotion Division.

In Ushiku City, when the Corona disaster occurred, the PC environment for employees required a wired connection, and there were three systems: the core system, the information system, and the intranet system.

Two notebook PCs, one for mission-critical systems and the other for information systems, were distributed to employees. Staff were required to use them for specific tasks. What’s more, each department was given only one desktop for Internet access, so employees found themselves using their own smartphone for research purposes.

When an emergency situation was declared and employees had to work in a dispersed work environment, they found themselves rewiring their own devices each time thus adding burdens to their working time. In addition, because terminals were prepared for each system, the work environment was also faced with the limitation of desk space.

Solution

To solve the complexity of having different network environments for specific operations and accelerate the response in handling work environments changes, Ushiku City introduced wireless LAN for its internal network and thin clients for two systems (one for information and the other for intranet). Since both systems are IT environments that handle important administrative information, both the network and terminal environments had to be fully secure.

In Ushiku City, even if each staff member operates a single thin client, all communications between the information and intranet systems must be kept out of the way. It was necessary to design the system in a way that would ensure strict security for administrative operations, such as preventing information-related data from being shared with the intranet environment. Ushiku City turned to hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) as a solution to meet these requirements. HCI allows the intranet and information systems to be logically separated on a single system and ensure security, rather than being separate systems, thus leading to lower costs.

After considering multiple HCI solutions, the new HCI solution selected was the Nutanix Cloud Platform and Flow Network Security for micro-segmentation. Taisuke Omachi, Manager of Digital Promotion Section, Citizen Department, Ushiku City, said, “Approximately 600 thin client terminals and wireless LAN access points have been newly installed, and almost all employees are using that environment. Desktop virtualization and wireless LAN have eased the new work style of distributed work by allowing employees to freely use the IT environment from anywhere. While maintaining security, a single laptop PC can be used to switch virtual desktop environments for the both the information system and the intranet system by depending on the nature of the work, ensuring a convenient system.”

Customer Outcome

The adoption of Nutanix has greatly improved the operational efficiency of the Digital Promotion Division’s IT staff and created an IT environment that allows for flexible teleworking. Kazuki Takimoto, Assistant Manager, Digital Promotion Section, Citizen Department, Ushiku City, adds, “Preparation work for distributed work used to take 5 staff members a full day, but now it can be done by 2 to 3 staff members in about half a day, and the complex IT environment setup work has been reduced to one-fourth of what it used to be.”

Takuya Sugiura, Group 2, Service Dept. 5, East Japan Service Office, Industrial & Distribution Platform Div. of Hitachi Systems, Ltd., a partner that has been supporting Ushiku City’s IT environment for some time, explained the background behind the proposal. “Nutanix has a proven track record and is highly reliable, and Prism operation is smooth and responsive. Flow Network Security can be easily controlled via GUI, helps the system to protect against threats without adding management burdens. We used both VDI and RDS (Remote Desktop Services) for the client environment, and Flow Network Security was able to restrict communication in and out of the VDI and RDS servers for both the intranet and information segments, ensuring security for the network and terminal environments.”

Next Steps

The Digital Promotion Division plans to continue to build a low-cost, easy-to-use IT environment, also utilizing Nutanix, in cooperation with Hitachi Systems, in order to improve convenience for citizens and employees.