About TrueNorth
TrueNorth is a privately held, closely-held risk management and insurance brokerage service provider. We understand our client’s needs by creating partnerships, offering industry insights, and creating solutions that extend well beyond an insurance policy. When your risks are properly managed, you'll feel secure knowing your company or family is prepared for what's to come. Our team of industry specialists works hard to offer a holistic approach, allowing you to better protect and maximize what matters most.
The challenge
TrueNorth needed a way to deploy and manage Amazon WorkSpaces to serve the needs of over 400 distributed employees. They also needed to manage this with a user-friendly front-end and a secure, admin-based backend for adding and changing users quickly and effectively. In addition, because they had a distributed team with very specific roles, they needed the administrative functions of the application to be very simple and straightforward when assigning users to specific groups, updating Active Directory appropriately, and more.
The solution
StratusGrid partnered with TrueNorth Companies to deploy AWS WorkSpaces and then build a small, serverless application that allowed them to easily manage over 400 of them for their distributed employees. This custom, fully integrated application allowed them to control what compute type each WorkSpace was based on the user’s Active Directory workgroup membership. If they moved a user into a different group, the application would schedule an upgrade or downgrade based on whatever group they were moved to. The upgrade would happen on an automated schedule after hours to reduce interruption. The development of the application also included a front end where a user could log in with Single Sign-On (SSO), with Active Directory or a normal login, and it would allow them to see details about their WorkSpace such as status, quick links to download the client, quick link to Support via TrueNorth, and more.
Benefits
Quick and simple
Because of our approach to application development, we were able to create a functional, efficient, and serverless environment that met TrueNorth’s immediate needs and provided clear business value to address their distributed workforce needs.
Serverless saves
Serverless empowered TrueNorth to spin up and quickly create an in-house application that met their business needs. During the optimization phase of this application, the serverless approach has saved time and resources when updating and changing the application.
Ability to expand
Another major advantage of our approach and how we deploy applications for our clients is that TrueNorth has the ability to quickly and easily expand their application to meet future needs for growth - for example, to improve user functionality or scale up resources as the application grows.
