Riverdale Poultry expands its distributed workforce with itopia’s turnkey cloud virtualization solution
Riverdale Poultry is the leading live poultry transport and catching service provider in Ontario. Riverdale exists to feed the country, delivering a critical logistics service to major poultry processors across Ontario for over 65 years.
The Challenge
Riverdale Poultry needed to provide its distributed workforce with remote access to Windows-based productivity apps on any device while transporting poultry across the province. While the company had previously done so using a VPN, the company’s rapid growth in recent years reduced the VPN’s performance and became difficult to manage at scale. Riverdale Poultry needed a new cloud-native VDI solution that could better accommodate the evolving computing needs of its expanding workforce, and also enable centralized management to simplify operations.
“itopia alleviated our latency issues. We saw a 10x speed increase in some of the applications that we’re using. itopia puts a box around the problem for you and says ‘hey, here’s your RDS deployment, now tweak it in a way that suits your business.’”
– Zach Lucier
Director of Data Analytics & Infrastructure at Riverdale Poultry
The Solution and Benefits
In the search for a cloud-native solution, itopia gained traction over competitors due to its ability to autoscale cloud resources and automate end-user management, driving significant cost savings for Riverdale’s IT operations. Because itopia launches virtual desktop & app deployments on Google Cloud’s high-speed network, Riverdale knew they could expect optimal performance and reliability, no matter how many remote workstations they deploy to their environment.
Riverdale Poultry ultimately chose itopia to equip its distributed workforce and ensure they have the fastest connection possible when remotely accessing key applications like accounting software and Microsoft Office 365 from any device and any location. itopia’s ability to rapidly put together fully-customized cloud environments in a turnkey fashion was exceptionally beneficial to Riverdale.
Because Riverdale Poultry takes advantage of itopia’s pay-for-what-you-use model on Google Cloud, the company avoided going down the path of expensive, upfront hardware costs for legacy on-premises VDI upgrades. itopia’s automation makes cloud environments easy to deploy, eliminating the need for IT staff to become VDI experts. As Riverdale continues to grow, its IT staff can rapidly onboard new employees and scale computing resources accordingly from itopia’s centralized management console.
“One thing I really like about itopia is that it tells you, and spins up for you, the exact VMs and roles you need, and then wires them up accordingly. That would have been something I wouldn’t have been able to do myself without a lot of investment and reading through Microsoft help documents for many hours,” said Zach Lucier, Director of Data Analytics & Infrastructure for Riverdale Poultry.
