How we helped Shire Leasing overhaul their VDI infrastructure

Over the last few years, technology has become increasingly vital to the financial services sector. In November 2024, a survey from Seismic found that almost all (92%) of financial services leaders were planning to invest in new technologies or VDI in order to meet growing customer demand.

With tech so central to the way this industry works, keeping downtime at an absolute minimum is non-negotiable. To do that effectively, you need an IT partner who understands your environment as a whole, and who can make the necessary changes whilst protecting all your existing processes and setups.

That’s exactly what we provided to Shire Leasing – building and optimizing Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, data centre, and network infrastructure, but also providing project management, second-and-third-line tech support, and a fully managed backup service for extra peace of mind.

Our relationship with the team is so close that their IT Director, Graham Coe, calls us “almost like an extension of Shire.” It’s high praise, and naturally users wanted to know what exactly we did to earn it.

Enter a series of webchats we held with our Head of Presales Kris Haynes – as a member of the VDI project team that worked with Shire Leasing, he was best placed to give some exclusive insights on the project.

As always, you provided us with plenty of questions – but we’ve whittled it down to the top 3…

What was the biggest technical challenge on the project?

“The biggest challenge was integrating all of the platform, cleanly, alongside legacy systems without causing any business disruption. We solved it by staging the deployment in layers – starting with a small, isolated pilot group and expanding only when performance and access were proven. This avoided downtime and kept the production environment stable.”

If Shire Leasing hadn’t upgraded when they did, what risks would they have faced?

“They were facing rising security risks, user frustration with performance, and higher support costs. Legacy systems don’t just underperform – they create vulnerabilities and can slow down the business. If they hadn’t acted, they would have likely ended up needing a bigger and more disruptive fix later, at potentially a higher cost and with more business risk.”

What advice would you give to other IT managers thinking about a similar project?

“Get clear on why you’re doing it – not just “upgrade for the sake of it,” but what business outcome you want. Keep the design simple, use proven technologies, and work with partners who will challenge your thinking, not just say yes. The more work you do upfront on scoping and priorities, the faster, cheaper and less disruptive your delivery is likely to be.”

Thank you to Kris for lending his time to the Shire Leasing web chat!

If you’ve got any questions about VDI for financial services or anything else we do, you can use the webchat too – just click on the red speech bubble in the right-hand corner of your screen.

Interested? Why not read the full case study? Or, find out how our Citrix Health Check – an independent review of your Citrix deployment – could help you answer any lingering questions about your Citrix environment.