Maryland Lottery and Gaming Selects Nutanix Xi Frame to Support Employees Working From Home Amid Global Pandemic

Nutanix has announced that Maryland Lottery and Gaming, an independent agency of the State of Maryland, is leveraging Nutanix Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution, Xi Frame, to quickly and easily enable employees to work from home. With Nutanix, the Lottery was able to deliver work from home capabilities to the team over a weekend.

Maryland Lottery faced an unexpected challenge when COVID-19 emerged. The IT team knew they needed a solution that would enable employees to work from home quickly and securely. As the Lottery team does not have enough laptops for all employees, Xi Frame allows them to provide the same access and tools while employees use their personal devices from any location. It also provides secure access to the network by allowing employees to easily access the VPN and connect via Microsoft RDP back to their desktop, and work just as if they were on their PC in the office.

“We rolled out Frame in about two days, it was that simple,” said Jeff Patchen, CIO at Maryland Lottery. “I was on the phone with a Nutanix engineer on Friday afternoon and had everything set up by Sunday at noon, allowing us to get users quickly on-board. At the moment we have about half of our employees utilizing Frame but it could support the entire agency if needed. Frame gives us the flexibility and agility to allow more users to telework.”

As work conditions continue to change and evolve on a daily basis, Maryland Lottery needed a fast deploying solution that provided the flexibility and scalability to allow employees to work from anywhere. Xi Frame enables the team to easily create virtual workspaces for its employees in less than an hour. The subscription model also allows the Lottery to quickly adapt to the changing situation without being locked into a long-term deal.

Maryland Lottery’s IT environment is the cornerstone of its business critical operations, supporting a variety of enterprise and business office applications. As a result, they needed a solution that could accelerate deployments and improve management, all while remaining secure and stable. Prior to implementing Nutanix HCI in 2015, their infrastructure consisted of a complex legacy network. In the past, it would take Maryland Lottery multiple hours or even days to restore a virtual machine, now they can do this within minutes. 

Nutanix software not only enables Maryland Lottery employees to work from home but also is allowing the team to speed up deployment times, reduce management burdens by approximately 50% and improve compliance and security. Nutanix’s Prism Pro allows the IT team to streamline their infrastructure, making it possible to check both of their clusters from one centralized console. After deploying Nutanix, Maryland Lottery’s end users noticed major performance improvements across the environment. Systems were running much faster including access to file servers, response time for the web servers and backups. 

“For IT leaders, it is imperative to provide employees the tools they need to succeed in their roles. In these unprecedented times, having the technology that allows employees to access their work applications and data from home is more important than ever”. “With Xi Frame, Maryland Lottery was able to rapidly roll out teleworking to employees, allowing them to get their jobs done and serve their customers reliably and securely.” 

said Nikola Bozinovic, VP and General Manager, Desktop Services, at Nutanix

For more information, read the Maryland Lottery case study.