itopia empowers Artnet to streamline mission-critical cloud infrastructure on GCP
Artnet is the leading online resource for the international art market, and the destination to buy, sell, and research art online. Founded in 1989 with the goal of bringing transparency to the art world, Artnet’s comprehensive suite of products offers a variety of art market resources to its audience of collectors, dealers, and art enthusiasts.
Challenge
As the COVID-19 pandemic forced employees to work remotely, stakeholders at leading online art data provider Artnet decided to simplify their management of distributed employees with a unified, cloud-native solution. While Artnet had measures in place to ensure business continuity, these measures were too complex to comprise a long-term solution for the new normal. Artnet CTO Matthew Cochran explained, “We decided a while back that we didn’t want any mission-critical information to live on our metal,” and the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this process.
Complex infrastructure management measures not only require excessive labor, but also can degrade remote productivity. For example, in the event that IT has to update the software on each employee’s individual device manually and can’t remotely update them all at once, employees won’t be productive because they won’t have access to the correct version of mission-critical applications.
Using itopia’s cloud automation and orchestration solution, Artnet deployed mission-critical desktops and apps to employees across the map.
Solution
Artnet ultimately decided to leverage itopia to deploy and manage their cloud infrastructure. This enabled employees to remotely access mission-critical information and proprietary applications necessary for continued productivity. It also simplified the IT staff’s remote management of the employees’ digital workspaces.
More specifically, itopia’s cloud automation and orchestration platform provided Artnet’s IT staff a single, unified control panel to streamline the process of remotely managing the new VDI environment. This novel approach to VDI management allowed Artnet to drastically simplify how it administers Windows workloads and scales infrastructure on-demand on Google Cloud.
The transition to the cloud eliminates excessive hardware costs, enables flexible scalability of resources, and reduces the latency that can slow down remote employees trying to connect to an on-premise data center. The deployment aligns with Artnet’s initiative to downsize its on-premise data center footprint and migrate workloads to Google Cloud.
"Our proprietary applications needed to be secured and delivered via the cloud. itopia and Google Cloud made this happen quickly and seamlessly."
- Matthew Cochran, CTO, Artnet
