How do you support around 1,000 analysts, many working on low-spec government laptops, without letting your virtual desktop estate become expensive, brittle or impossible for a small engineering team to manage?
In this practical session, Emilie MacMullen shares how DESNZ transformed the operating model behind its Cloud Based Analytical Service using Azure Virtual Desktop and Nerdio. The story starts with a familiar problem: VMs running 24/7, engineers manually checking host pool health, outsourced patching, slow recovery from crashed machines, limited reporting and rising costs. It then moves into the concrete changes that made a difference.
Emilie will explain how DESNZ used Nerdio to reduce AVD costs by 80%, move towards demand-based compute, automate patching, improve visibility of VM usage and cost, and shift image releases from a time-consuming quarterly process to a more regular monthly cadence.
The session will focus on practical examples rather than abstract transformation language: how auto-scaling helps reduce wasted compute, how granular controls protect users running background jobs, how dashboards give service owners and finance teams better visibility, how automation reduces maintenance overhead, and how a small team can use these changes to stretch the same budget further.
Emilie will also reflect on the wider public sector value: lower cost of ownership is not just a finance metric. It creates room to improve the service, onboard users more easily, support better analytical decision-making, reduce unnecessary consumption, and focus engineering effort where it has the greatest impact.
This is a grounded story from the front line of government cloud transformation: honest, practical and directly useful for anyone managing AVD, analytical infrastructure, cloud costs, or digital change in a complex organisation.
