Providing Telework Services at Scale

Department of Veterans Affairs

Client Challenge

The VA encountered a significant challenge during the unforeseen shift to remote work during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Hundreds of thousands of employees lacked access to essential applications due to the absence of government-furnished equipment (GFE). Veterans Engineering (VE), working with the VA’s Office of Information and Technology (OIT), had to find a solution within one week to provide remote access to everyone who needed it.

Our Solution

Working within VA’s OIT, VE rearchitected a solution using Citrix Access Gateway (CAG), which provides users with secure access to network resources. By rearchitecting the Citrix implementation to take advantage of the elasticity of cloud service providers (CSPs), which dynamically scales to this day based on user demand rather than the old architecture, which relied on a static number of physical data centers.

Client Impact

As publicly reported by the VA, “The number of possible remote connections surged from 120,000 to 500,000, while Citrix Access Gateway (CAG) capacity jumped from 16,000 to almost 180,000.” VE’s architecture allowed the VA to support the rapid shift to telework, enabling user access to the VA network. It also implemented a telework infrastructure that allowed autoscaling of infrastructure for cost-optimized telework and future demand spikes. VE and VA’s OIT swiftly devised a solution, and within a mere week, they successfully facilitated remote access for all those who needed it.