JIM RADZICKI: Hello everyone and welcome to our session,
Enabling TELUS International to Securely
Work from Anywhere with itopia on the Google Cloud.
I'm Jim Radzicki from TELUS International.
I'll be joined by Jonathan Lieberman from itopia.
This session is really a case study
or a story of how the impact of COVID-19
created a challenge for TELUS International
that we were able to quickly deploy a solution on the itopia
platform to not only take our customers today into the cloud,
but to also create a go to market solution for the Future
So as mentioned, I'm Jim Radzicki,
I'm the Chief Technology Officer for TELUS International,
and I'd like to introduce Jonathan Lieberman from itopia.
JONATHAN LIEBERMAN: It's great to be with you here today,
Jim, presenting our success story
would TELUS International.
We're a Google Cloud technology partner, premier partner,
that helps enterprises turn every employee
into a remote worker within 24 hours.
JIM RADZICKI: And at TELUS International,
we're a global customer experience digital solutions
provider.
What that means is we design, build,
and deliver digital customer solutions for the world's
most respected brands.
We've been doing it for more than 15 years
and those brands include companies such as Google.
To set the stage a little bit for the challenge that
presented us and particularly around COVID-19,
I want to share a little bit about who we are
and where we operate because that plays into the story.
So first, TELUS International.
We have nearly 50,000 employees around the globe,
we operate in over 20 countries, we have more than 600 clients.
And we service those clients in more than 50 languages.
In particular, we also have a digital solutions arm.
These digital solutions folks, again, they're
actually building and designing digital customer experiences
for our customers.
We have just over 4,000 folks who actually do this for us.
We operate those out of seven countries.
And we have more than 350 clients that are particularly
focused on digital solutions.
So to set the stage, March 17.
At that moment, of those nearly 50,000 employees that we had,
TELUS International had none, actually, of our frontline team
members who were actually in a work from home environment.
We had some back office folks, but really,
from a frontline perspective, we had zero team members.
If you roll back the clock to March 17 and think about where
we were in this overall pandemic--
it's amazing how fast times have changed here--
but on March 17, one of the first countries
to decide to put a stay at home order in place
was the Philippines.
And if you look at that footprint that we had,
we have a large presence at TELUS International
in the Philippines.
Fast forward a little bit in each of the days coming up--
actually, in the next 11 days--
more than six countries that we operated in
started to put stay put orders and stay home orders in place,
and that trend continued.
So the challenge that faced us was apparent.
We needed something to quickly deploy,
that allowed us, TELUS International,
to take this global workforce that we had and get them up
and running in a work and home environment.
And for that, we reached out to Google
to look for a partner who can help us get to that state.
JOHN TARANU: Thanks, Jim.
Hi my name is John Taranu and I'm the Google Cloud Customer
Engineer working with TELUS International
for the past 3 and 1/2 years.
So TELUS International reached out to me in a panic,
just as this whole global pandemic thing was starting up.
And I'm not a VDI expert by any stretch,
so I didn't know what to recommend initially.
So I reached out to people who are
VDI experts within our cloud team,
and I asked them for their suggestions,
and they recommended that I consider itopia.
Now itopia was a Google Cloud Partner of the Year,
and they had this fantastic reputation
of spinning up virtual desktop solutions rapidly and securely.
I also reached out to some of my peer customer engineers
who had worked with itopia before,
and they had only great things to say
about how responsive and collaborative
the itopia team was with their customers.
So I felt really excited that we had an opportunity
to help TELUS International with this urgent crisis,
and I went out and reached out to the itopia team.
And that was a sort of a great collaboration together.
So over to you, Jonathan.
JONATHAN LIEBERMAN: Thanks, John.
So I'm sitting at my desk and up pops this email
from TELUS International.
This is the actual email from someone
with a great sense of humor asking rhetorically,
if you could launch VDI over the weekend, that would be great.
And it turns out they weren't kidding.
TELUS International literally needed
to provide thousands of workers access
to their mission critical business applications
in desktops over the coming weekend.
Now an email with this kind of request
might have struck fear with other companies,
but for us, it was just another day at the office.
We were not at all fazed by this request
and our teams were ready to get to work.
At the most basic level, itopia turns every employee
into a remote worker.
We do this through a solution we call Desktop
as a Service, which gives employees
fast and secure access to their desktops
and apps as though they were physically in the office.
Now here's Jamie, who works in one
of TELUS's international large delivery centers
in the Philippines who is now working from home.
Using an e-device, a Chromebook, MacBook, laptop, PC, or tablet,
Jamie is able to connect through a web browser or a small app
to a full cloud-hosted desktop or just the apps
that she uses most.
Instead of the desktop or the application being installed
on a server under her desk, it's being hosted in the nearest
Google Cloud data center, where the connections are fast,
the security is tight, and the technology is unparalleled.
So we built itopia to simplify and modernize
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or VDI,
as most people commonly refer to it today.
VDI is a technology that's been around since the mid-'90s.
It was invented way before hyperscale cloud computing
to help companies enable their people to work remotely.
Unfortunately, VDI got very complex and costly to install
and maintain.
It consists of multiple stacks of hardware and software
from compute to storage to networking,
and this requires a lot of upfront investment
into a bunch of gear and software
that sits in the data center, and begins
to depreciate in value the minute that you buy it.
And to make matters worse, it cannot scale on demand
to handle a situation like we had with COVID-19,
and it must be managed by a team of senior engineers,
So what we did at itopia was completely
rethink the approach to VDI by modernizing it
as a fast to deploy, simple to use, Cloud
native solution purpose built for Google Cloud.
We got rid of the complex technology stack
and replaced it with a unified console that
can be easily operated by tier 1 tech, who can enable and manage
a worldwide VDI deployment in any Google data center
with a single click.
JIM RADZICKI: Thanks, Jon.
So here we were, a pandemic facing the world.
Through Google and the relationship,
we were introduced to itopia, who
showed us and were impressed with an incredibly
quick to deploy.
If you think about the times we're talking about here,
this sounds like something you would
have done over the course of weeks or months
with an introduction, getting the proof of concept.
We were up and running on the proof of concept
within the first 24 hours, proving and testing
the technology to make sure it could work.
Soon after proving that it was available to us,
now we needed to get into securing it.
So we had to look at the architecture.
We had to make sure that for our client base, for our employees,
not only could we keep them safe,
but we can keep our customers and their data safe.
We needed to understand the architecture
and how that architecture is flexible enough
for us to secure the wide varieties of customers
that we had.
So with that, Jon, I flipped it back over to you to say, hey,
how can we secure it?
JONATHAN LIEBERMAN: Thanks, Jim.
So the novel aspect about our approach to VDI,
and the reason that we're able to deploy it so quickly
is because our solution is pure automation and orchestration.
There's no software to install, no hardware
to buy, procure, and implement.
We're automating what Google already
has in place and everything runs in our customer's projects.
We consider five key elements to what we automate
in our modern DAS deployment.
Number one is the RDS infrastructure platform itself
in every single region that's required
and in the case of TELUS International,
seven regions around the world.
Number two is the networking which
consist of firewalls, VPNs, and load balancers--
again, everything that Google brings to the table
from a technology point of view.
The third is file servers, which are used for storage and data
protection.
Fourth is the directory services that leverage Google-managed AD
or allows a customer to spin up their own domain controllers.
It's a very flexible approach.
And then finally, a management and monitoring
console, which leverages Stackdriver
and Google BigQuery.
JIM RADZICKI: Thanks, Jon.
Now we're checking the boxes for what we had.
So March 17, we're stuck, we needed
something quick to deploy.
We now have a solution that we can deploy.
Now we needed to make it secure.
We needed to make sure that we can actually keep employees
safe and customers safe.
Well, as you saw in the opening, TELUS International,
we have more than 600 clients.
There is no one solution, no one setting that's
going to apply to all 600.
We needed this to be customizable.
We needed it to be refinable.
We needed to know that we can use it for voice.
We need to know data-heavy applications.
Some of our clients require us to use their own VPN.
Some of them didn't want the desktop to be shown.
Some of them only wanted certain tool sets to be available.
Some of them had requirements for HIPAA.
Some of them had requirements-- you name it.
With 600, there were 600 different ways
in which we had this.
For that, I reached back out to Jon
again to understand how we can customize and refine
the itopia desktop.
JONATHAN LIEBERMAN: That's right, Jim.
So in order to meet TELUS International's requirements,
our software enabled the security policies, rules,
permissions from TELUS International's clients on prem
ADs to be extended into Google Cloud.
And every situation, as you can imagine, was different.
And our solution acts as a bridge
so that there's no compromise in security profile
when one of TELUS International's clients
are being transitioned and delivered through the cloud.
Now every client needed to enable
support for a variety of use cases from light workloads
to productivity apps to heavier graphical and media
applications.
And our platform made it possible
with easy-to-add custom images to provision workers,
auto scaling of virtual machines, intelligent user
routing to the nearest GCP data center.
And this ensured low latency and delivered a very unified point
and click console in every browser.
And because our software is orchestration-only,
we don't have any access to the customer's data.
This means that from a regulatory point of view,
our software and the solution that we deliver through Google
was able to adhere to the standards
that TELUS International's clients demanded,
from SOC to PCI to FINRA, HIPAA, FedRAMP, you name it.
Jim, back over to you.
JIM RADZICKI: Thanks, Jon.
So we're checking the boxes now on all the things,
and again, thinking back, this was literally days into this.
It seems, again, like this would be the things we
do over the course of months.
So we were quick to deploy.
We got that proof of concept up and running.
Able to show that we can get the desktops deployed,
that they were easy to maintain.
We had to secure them.
We had to prove to our clients and our employees
that we're able to make it a safe and productive
environment, keeping their data as safe
as it would be as if it were in the office.
Then we needed to customize it.
We had to make it more refinable.
Every client has their requirement
that needed to be in place, and we needed to get it done,
and we check that off, as well.
Lastly, operating around the globe as we do,
operating with as many folks as we do,
we needed to make sure this solution was globally scalable.
Extremely important in a virtual desktop environment,
low latency.
The distance between or the time between where
the servers are to where the end points are
people working from home--
the smaller the better.
It just works better that way.
So for that, we reached back out to Google
to learn a little bit about how we can deploy this on the GCP.
JOHN TARANU: So one of the biggest reasons
the TELUS International team were considering
Google Cloud for the solution is our global footprint,
with over two dozen regions around the world
and new regions that are coming online and regularly.
This is especially important to TELUS International
as their employee base is spread out around the world.
The sites in North and Central America,
many countries in eastern and western Europe, India,
and the Philippines.
So we designed a deployment of itopia
for TELUS International in six Google Cloud regions, such
that for every TELUS International geography,
they had at least two TCP regions
within the same continent for additional redundancy.
And the magic that brings together TELUS International's
employees to their virtual desktop environments
is one of Google Cloud's greatest strengths--
a private, secure, high speed, global backbone.
That's the same backbone that already provides
them access to Google services that they rely on
in their daily lives.
And this ensures that TELUS International employees working
from home around the world have a connection through their home
internet service provider, through the existing
in-country high speed peer connections that Google
has maintained for decades with telcos around the world,
directly into Google's backbone, and then
to their virtual desktop at Google Cloud.
And for each site, there were redundant network paths
to take to the servers.
Especially for employees in places like Guatemala
and the Philippines who rely on submarine cables
to connect to the internet, having a redundant network path
to a server on the same continent instead of undersea
cables across the ocean means that their latency is lower
and their user experience on their virtual desktop is good.
And if TELUS International tried to build
their own private network appearing
to serve their work from home employees like this,
it would be prohibitively expensive.
By relying on Google Cloud, a global deployment is easy.
JIM RADZICKI: So there's no better scale
than running this on the Google Cloud Platform.
So now we've checked all the boxes.
We had it up and running, we made it serviceable and secure,
we've refined it for our customer needs,
we've leveraged the GCP to scale this around the globe.
And literally, within just a few days,
we have stable operations.
So where do we go from here?
Well, as I mentioned also, TELUS International,
with our digital solutions capabilities,
we actually were able to take this to the market.
So in a true sense of partnership,
not only were we leveraging this for our own needs,
but we also decided that our success story is something
that a lot of other people are going to need,
not only in the current pandemic,
but as you look into the future, as well.
So one more time, I reached back out to Jon to say,
hey, how can we take advantage of this in a go
to market strategy.
JONATHAN LIEBERMAN: Thanks, Jim.
The natural next question is this
since we've gotten it deployed and successfully onboarded
thousands of workers, what can we
do next to make our partnership even stronger?
And we talked to your solutions folks
who were so impressed with the speed and simplicity
of our platform that we together decided
to integrate it and bring it to market
as part of your core customer care suite of solutions.
JIM RADZICKI: Yes, it's become actually a part
of our overall package now, what we call Work From Anywhere.
So if you think about what's required
for someone to work from home--
and this is the true future road of operations
that we're working toward--
first, you need to connect.
So as you look at TELUS International's work
from anywhere solution, the first
is a cloud native omnichannel-centered platform
that allows folks to connect with not
only their own companies, but also with their customers
anywhere and in an internet connection can reach.
Right smack in the middle of the platform
is exactly what we just talked about from itopia--
to enable that remote virtual desktop
so that we can bring not only the omnichannel solution,
but the full suite of desktop applications
that were needed with inside your company or your site--
bring those to the home in a secure and safe manner.
And then lastly, you need to engage with people.
We talk about all of the technology through this,
but it's still at the end of the day,
people who are working and connecting
with their customers.
So a full suite of products for the customer experience that
allow us to stay meaningfully engaged with our employees
while they're working from home.
So to give you a little sense of it,
here's a snapshot of actually, those employees
all working from their at-home environments
with virtual desktops.
And it wouldn't be complete if we
didn't show a little bit with all of us having our pets
there, as well.
So a little bit of that positive experience
from the work at home and some of the pets
at TELUS International.
So with that, I thank you for joining us.
I'm Jim Radzicki.
You can reach out to me here at jimradzicki@telu
sinternational.com.
And I'll hand it to Jonathan Lieberman
to say a few words to close us out.
JONATHAN LIEBERMAN: Thanks, Jim.
So in our view, this is only the beginning
of a very exciting partnership.
To take our joint solution to the market,
to help companies all over the world,
to give their employees the ability to work from home.
Thanks again for joining us and for having us and allowing
us to tell our success story.