Amazon Speeds Desktop Deployment for 25,000 Global Workers Using Amazon WorkSpaces

To address its challenges, the Client Engineering team began a pilot program using Amazon WorkSpaces for 500 global contractors. Amazon WorkSpaces is a managed desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) solution that enables the provisioning of desktops in minutes. “Once our WorkSpaces environment was up and running, adding new users—whether by the tens or by the thousands—was simple and fast,” Blackard says. “Because WorkSpaces are accessible over the internet from anywhere in the world, and the WorkSpaces service is always expanding to new regions (with a dozen regions supported today), Amazon’s operations are free to expand unbounded by infrastructure availability or latency concerns.”

Using Amazon WorkSpaces, the Client Engineering team greatly reduced desktop deployment time for contractors. “We only need to provision accounts to set up Amazon WorkSpaces, which takes minutes instead of the three months we would normally spend shipping PCs and putting infrastructure in place,” says Blackard. “All the usual IT touchpoints go away with WorkSpaces, so contractors can access the resources they need immediately.”

As Amazon expanded its outsourcer footprint to include additional contractors, such as call center employees who supplement full-time support staff for Amazon customers, the Client Engineering team needed policies to determine the level of access contractors required to do their jobs. “Using Amazon WorkSpaces, we can make sure that any outbound traffic from a WorkSpace is first funneled through a web filter, which in turn only permits access to the internal sites we choose. It’s easy for IT to configure and manage access,” says Blackard.

Based on the initial success of the contractor program, the Client Engineering team expanded the use of Amazon WorkSpaces to new areas where the need for fast, highly secure, and scalable access was required. One example is the need to quickly give new employees access to the Amazon Corporate IT network following an acquisition. “Amazon acquired a company in India, and we were able to onboard the new employees very quickly using Amazon WorkSpaces,” says Blackard. The Client Engineering team initially used Amazon WorkSpaces to enable desktops for about 70 remote employees from the new India subsidiary. That number gradually grew to 2,000 once the team saw the benefits of simplified deployment with Amazon WorkSpaces. “WorkSpaces has now become the default method of onboarding employees after an acquisition.”