Efficient virtual training for police officers with UDS Enterprise VDI

• Name: Peel Regional Police

• Sector: Public

• Number of employees: Over 2,000 police officers and almost 900 civilian employees

• Location: Cities of Brampton and Mississauga (Ontario, Canada)

Peel Regional Police is the third largest police service in Ontario and the fourth largest municipal police service in Canada. They serve the Cities of Brampton and Mississauga and the Pearson International Airport. With over 2,000 police officers and almost 900 civilian employees, their solvency rates are some of the highest in the country and their crime rates are below provincial levels. The continuous training of the police officers is essential to achieve these results.

With Covid-19 and the various physical distance restrictions that were placed on use, Peel Regional Police needed a way to implement remote officer training, so officers could get the training they required safely. “There were a few possible VDI solutions out on the market that met our specific requirements. Most of which would require a significant investment in time and additional hardware costs to implement. UDS Enterprise has provided Peel Regional Police with a cost-effective method of conducting specialized training of officers in different divisions and departments,” says William Wallace, Police Acting Detective at Peel Regional Police.

As a law enforcement organization, they have many locations spanning out over a large geographical area. “Making the decision to go with a VDI solution to meet our virtual training needs was a logical one. Peel Regional Police already uses different virtualization software for other functions within our organization. What made UDS Enterprise stand out was how simple it was to set up and integrate into our existing infrastructure,” explains Wallace
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UDS Enterprise VDI solution is very customizable. It is this form of personalization that has allowed Peel Regional Police to completely customize a virtual environment based on the different user groups that an officer is a member of. “With this ability, officer training courses that require the use of specific software can be easily deployed and accessible to uniform members at our various divisions. Plus, this is all managed and maintained from a single console that is accessible by web browser,” details the Detective.

Accessibility via a web browser is also true about the officer’s end point experience, in that the officer can be seated at any networked computer and launch a VDI session though whatever browser is installed on that computer. The use of a browser as a user interface has saved Peel Police time in configuring and installing thin clients instead of computers throughout the organization.

“Since the implementation of the remote virtual training environment using UDS Enterprise, we have streamlined and changed the way Peel Regional Police does its training for uniform members,” affirms Wallace.

SECURE VDI FOR A SANDBOX TYPE OF NETWORK

Simplicity, efficiency and cost-effectiveness were key points for Peel Regional Police to choose, UDS Enterprise as the VDI solution for their virtual training necessities with the help of the experts of Wayz Infratek. Last but not least was its suitability for a sandbox type of network where the security of the infrastructure is a must.

The IT team didn’t want anyone to be able to copy files or data through the session to avoid malware accidentally getting through. The client VM’s are behind a firewall in a separate tenant, and their current corporate VDI software required so much infrastructure and had some challenges in this context.

With UDS Enterprise, they managed to build a solution fulfilling all their security requirements and guaranteeing training continuity, with no downtime for the users. “We didn’t want the VM’s to remain after usage, but when police officers login again, they need to get access to another machine immediately without having to wait,” expresses the Police Acting Detective.

They find many of the UDS Enterprise’s technical functionalities very useful, like the calendar function. This helps them to force initial services and clearing assigned services to reset everything each day to optimize the use of resources and the performance of the virtual machines.

“Given our use-case, we may even just use a server and script some VM processes. However, after trying UDS Enterprise, we were clear our project may be worth any additional costs. It is a great product, has excellent documentation and the team behind the software provide responsive and personalized support service,” affirms William Wallace.

The IT experts from Peel Regional Police who tested the solution highly recommended its adoption. “Feedback was very positive. Both the users and the team were eager to move forward and start using UDS Enterprise, they really like how the product just works,” concludes Wallace.

VDI INFRASTRUCTURE

• Broker: UDS Enterprise

• Hypervisor: VMware vSphere / Proxmox

• Connection Protocols: HTML5 and RDP

• Authenticator: Active Directory (LDAP)

• VDI OS: Mainly Linux (Ubuntu) and some Windows 10 machines

• Access OS: Any