El Prat de Llobregat is a municipality in the province of Barcelona with a population of 65,000 inhabitants. The staff of the city council consists of 800 people, and in a first phase the Awingu workspace has been implemented to manage the telework of 50 of them.

Like most of the city councils, the one of el Prat de Llobregat had to implement new systems to cope with the need to telework due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In this case, like in many other city councils and companies, the process had to be done quickly and immediately, since the measures imposed by the Government required an imminent confinement.

El Prat de Llobregat is part of the Barcelona metropolitan area.

Remote access within municipalities
For the Municipality of El Prat de Llobregat, like many other public administrations, the digital signature is something necessary in their day-to-day work. The town hall had to make a rapid evolution to be able to provide access to the usual applications and digital signature remotely and securely.

“Using more traditional tactics like VPNs for example, is more complicated and not the best way to maintain high levels of security,” explains Adrián Russo Gallo, General Manager of Indigo, IT partner of the Municipality of Prat de Llobregat:

You have to find out who is connecting and control the device that connects to the network. Nobody is prepared to suddenly have 800 users outside the organization, it’s very complicated to have all those laptops ready with Windows 10, a managed VPN and all the required security.

Adrián Russo Gallo
General Manager, Indigo

That is why, when the Municipality of Prat de Llobregat presented its need to Indigo, Awingu was one of the candidates for a proof of concept.

Adrián Russo Gallo had known Awingu for many years, he was aware of the potential and innovative nature of the solution, but the solution was still at an early stage at a commercial level and still lacked expansion at a business level. The product was released in 2014, and at that time the demand was not quite clear. However, there were small occasions the years before, where Awingu was one of the proposed solutions. “I would say that Awingu today is the benchmark for remote desktop solutions, remote applications, … in every aspect!”

Indigo did proofs of concept in which different solutions were assessed, including Awingu’s. During the tests, since they wanted to meet all the requirements proposed by the municipality, the other solutions were gradually discarded, leaving Awingu, in which they saw numerous advantages: from the most technological part to the adaptability, security, speed of implementation, simplicity, … and a very important factor: the cost, which provides sustainability in the future. After the successful POC, technology partner Indigo bought the Awingu licenses for the municipality via the Spanish distributor MCR.

Flexibility, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness as key benefits
From the implementer’s point of view, one of Awingu’s advantages is that it is an integrator, highlighting aspects such as adaptability, rapid implementation, and its intuitive nature. That allowed the municipality to integrate certain heavy solutions from different vendors very easily. “With Awingu we found the perfect balance,” Adrian tells us.

Other advantages are the possibility of integration with Active Directory and MFA (multi-factor authentication), which is already included in the platform itself. They didn’t count on the latter, so they were grateful to have this added advantage: “It’s not that you have to integrate another MFA, because it’s already part of the product. However, if you want to integrate another one, you can do it too, because there is no impediment. Whatever you want, it fits – a great improvement!“

Another important factor is that thanks to Awingu’s adaptability, the Municipality of El Prat de Llobregat was able to set up the solution on-premise. This flexibility was not available with other solutions and was very important for the town hall: “With other solutions it is extremely more expensive to be able to do it on premise. In terms of cloud solutions, maybe there’s not that much difference, but when we set up on premise, the difference is huge.”

Another critical point had been to be able to do the digital signature, which is so important in a public administration. Fortunately, it was also possible to do it within Awingu.

Also, we can’t forget, as mentioned by Joan de la Paz, SiTIC services responsible of the municipality, that entities different from the town halls (such as sport centers, manors, etc.) are normally managed by outsourced companies or enterprises under concession with their own IT infrastructures. In this scenario, Awingu has been the perfect gateway to keep the high levels of security and control requested by the client, giving connection between the different entities under concession and their IT policies.

The advantages of Awingu not only for municipalities, but also for private companies. “If they do a good study of the technical and economic feasibility and the implementation time, Awingu will be the clear winner,” explains Adrián.

You can see that it is developed from the customer’s perspective, adapting to the customer’s needs, not the other way around as it happens in most solutions. You buy a solution and you’re waiting to see where we need to modify something, with Awingu it’s not like that: Everything is easy.

Adrián Russo Gallo
General Manager, Indigo

Next steps with Awingu
Users have certainly been very satisfied. Currently, the city council is in the first phase of implementation and will soon continue its deployment until it reaches 800 users.

Now, it is only used for teleworking, but later on, they are going to expand the project. It has been a change of philosophy and that took some time, because it is a big adaptation. Furthermore, usability has improved thanks to Awingu.

In conclusion, flexibility, speed of implementation and cost were the main reasons why Municipality of El Prat de Llobregat, together with the partner Indigo, chose Awingu to enable remote working within the public administration.

Savia (Soluciones Avanzadas en Informática Aplicada) is a Spanish specialist provider of payroll and personnel management solutions for the public administration. More than 500 public organizations digitize and automate human resources administrative processes with their technology, gaining in efficiency and focusing on boosting talent and public performance. Their projects go beyond the technological aspect and put people at the center by accompanying them in the process of change to achieve the digital and cultural transformation of organizations.

Currently, Savia uses Awingu to facilitate their clients’ access to their cloud platform. They achieve this with a simpler, faster login and all framed in a single point accessible through a browser. In the past, they used RemoteApp or a remote desktop connection, which fell far short of Awingu, as Javier Prieto, Head of Marketing at Savia, explains. The key role played by our technology partner Claranet, working together with the Spanish distributor MCR, helped them to identify how Awingu could support them.

The digitization of public administration

One of the biggest problems for personnel departments is the excess of low-value tasks and the need for strategic focus. Technology and specialized services digitize all these administrative processes in their department, resulting in a change that is transferred to the entire organization.

The public sector has been accelerating its digitization exponentially, and employees play an essential role in that transition. HR teams are a driving force behind cultural and digital transformations and must be the first to internalize those changes and the new ways of working.

Therefore, Savia’s technological accompaniment, advice and support, in combination with Awingu, is contributing to the efficiency, digitization and improvement of the Public Administration, ultimately impacting on public service.

In search of a secure and easy solution

To facilitate this, Savia was looking for another solution to provide access to their users. This solution had to meet several requirements related to security, simplicity, and scalability:

• Bringing greater security to their cloud services: isolating their solutions with an additional layer of security between the applications and the user.
• Provide a less vulnerable form of access: Such as a remote desktop, which is more susceptible to certain threats.
• Accessibility for your users: Allowing your solutions to be accessible regardless of architecture, OS, or device.
• Scalability: Being able to scale resources based on demand.

They looked for a browser-based HTML5 solution and found Awingu among different alternatives. After testing, SAVIA quickly confirmed that Awingu matched its aforementioned needs:

“We saw that Awingu offered intuitive, fast and secure access. We chose it because it covered everything we needed. Awingu was the only solution that offered file management within a web environment in a very intuitive way”.

Javier Prieto
CMO, Savia

Today, Awingu is in a production environment providing access to solutions for more than 200 customers. They have received good feedback from their customers about the look & feel and the user experience. According to them, they have not only gained in accessibility and user experience, but also in speed and elimination of steps to access the solutions. In addition, they have found the scalability and redundancy possibilities useful without any problems for their users.

I’m thrilled to announce that Canadian-based Corel has acquired Awingu. Awingu has experienced rapid growth over the last year as the global workforce embraces permanent remote and hybrid business models and this is a great time for the next chapter in our story. Awingu is known for its powerful simplicity, and is recognized as a Unified Workspace and Zero Trust solution by analysts such as Gartner and Forrester.

Corel is a leading provider of solutions that promote workplace creativity, productivity, and collaboration. It’s the home of Parallels, an award-winning virtualization and VDI solution that includes Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) and Parallels Desktop. The acquisition of Awingu strengthens Corel’s ability to deliver a secure, productive remote workspace for its millions of users.

This is good news for our customers and partners! Joining forces with Corel doesn’t replace Awingu, but rather enhances its capabilities. We truly believe that Parallels and Awingu are complementary technologies that build on each other and are stronger together. The combination results in a unified product that leverages the unique strengths of both solutions and meets an urgent market need for remote access and workspace technology. It also gives Awingu technologists more access to R&D resources to further expand and enhance the Awingu offering in ways that may not have been possible before.

While the Awingu technology isn’t going anywhere, the Awingu brand will be replaced by the Parallels brand over time. As much as we loved and are proud of the Awingu brand, no longer will our Awingurus need to explain that Wingu is the Swahili word for cloud. The Awingu teams will stay in place and will gradually be combined with the Corel and Parallels teams. I am also pleased to announce that I’ll be joining the Corel team moving forward, and I’m excited about what the future holds for our combined companies.

This acquisition means that Awingu will be part of a larger organization with more scale in customer success, sales, marketing, product development and support. Our commercial leverage will grow significantly. Awingu has strong and growing coverage in EMEA, which will be extended by Parallels’ global channels and vice versa. This opens the door for even stronger proximity to customers and partners.

On behalf of the Awingu team, I want to say that I’m really looking forward to this new chapter. I wish to thank all Awingu partners and customers who have supported and trusted us. Our journey is only getting started!

We will continue to communicate to our partners and customers, as plans take more shape and operational realities start to change.

Warm Regards,

Walter Van Uytven, CEO Awingu

Nederlandstalige versie: zie onder

The Fire Brigade Zone Rivierenland (Zone Antwerp 2) is one of the 35 Belgian and one of the five Antwerp rescue zones. The zone officially started operating on 1 January 2015 and provides fire and medical assistance (ambulance) in the southwest of the province of Antwerp.

The Fire Brigade Zone Rivierenland comprises 19 municipalities that together represent a population of approximately 420,000. The total surface of the service area covers approximately 570 km². The Zone Rivierenland also borders on other ones like Antwerp, Rand, Kempen, East Flemish Brabant, Flemish Brabant West, East and Waasland.

Which applications are used via Awingu?

The IT department of the Fire Brigade Squad Rivierenland explains which applications are made available through Awingu in a safe way, based on the profile of the user.

ABIFIRE

For many zones ABIFIRE is the centre of daily operations. It contains modules for intervention reports, privacy-related personnel data, construction advice, prevention reports, material management and much more. If this package is not available for technical or security reasons, the operation of the zone practically stops.

For Rivierenland, it was therefore an absolute necessity to secure ABIFIRE even more. For them it was a minimum requirement that they could secure the login procedure with multi-factor authentication. As this is also built into Awingu, this was the first checkbox that could be ticked.

3P

The 3P package is a mandatory tool of the Government in procurement procedures. This application is also made available in the Awingu Virtual Workspace because the 3P licence only works with pre-agreed domain credentials.

BLUEBEAM

As a CAD programme, Bluebeam is a widely used tool within rescue districts to draw or modify plans. At HVZ Rivierenland this application runs on a separate server.

“Before Awingu was brought into use, this program was installed locally on each device. This required a lot of maintenance and follow-up, which can now be done centrally at the server level due to the limited IT team. Also, the performance for those who work remotely through Awingu is optimal with this CAD application. Thanks to Awingu, we were able to tick 2 more boxes.”

HERMES

The old, well-known accounting program is no longer current or in use at the zone. However, there is still a need to be able to access certain data here. Awingu as secure gateway brings here the perfect balance between security and user experience. Also, the impact of the irregular use of Hermes is nil, since the Awingu licenses are based on a concurrent model and not on a named basis. Another thing HVZ Rivierenland could tick off thanks to Awingu!

MERCURIUS

The Mercurius billing software is not only used by HVZ Rivierenland, but also by various local police zones. (Today, more than 60 police zones in Belgium work with Awingu). Within the HVZ, the need arose to build in some extra security. For example, there was no MFA foreseen for the internally hosted, web-based application, making the security risk too high. By putting this application behind Awingu, with MFA and a protocol switch on the Awingu appliance, a direct connection between the end user device and the server backend environment is avoided.

DIV

The DIV of the Flemish Government can now also be accessed directly, whereas previously the IT service had to push an Internet shortcut in each user profile.

REMOTE DESKTOP

To securely access your own servers from the outside, a secure connection is made via Awingu’s remote desktop functionality. In addition, every login and activity can be traced in the Awingu dashboard. Something that has proven to be very useful. This was the case when a certain anti-virus program caused another program to close down promptly. Of course, this also happened to be on a non-managed device belonging to one of the volunteers who work for the zone… Via the track & trace in Awingu, this issue could be detected and resolved fairly quickly, says the IT department as an anecdote.

The effect of Awingu at HVZ Rivierenland

We can conclude that the users are satisfied and the IT team even more so because, compared to the former Citrix use, there has been a strong simplification with Awingu.

“Volunteers who do not use a managed device from the zone, can simply use their own device to access the necessary applications as well as the file share that was integrated after the switch to Awingu. On top of that, nothing needs to be installed on the devices themselves, because Awingu is completely browser-based. This saves our IT admins time for configuration and maintenance, but also significantly reduces the cost for the type of devices.” The only thing that still needs to be installed is the remote application helper when using a Smartcard (eID).

In terms of security, huge steps have been taken with the introduction of just one tool, Awingu:

• MFA is built in for free
• All data processed through the browser is encrypted
• A complete audit of everything is available
• Even screen recording is used in some cases (especially when suppliers need access to the network).

The fact that HVZ East-Flemish Brabant and West-Flemish Brabant have also started working with Awingu, shows that HVZ Rivierenland is not alone and has made the right decision with this future proof solution.

June 2^nd 2022, Ghent/Brussels – Awingu is proud to have received the Data News “Digital Workplace Innovator of the Year” Award at yesterday’s Data News “Awards for Excellence 2022” event in Brussels Expo. The awards are the results of a solid selection process by the editorial staff of Data News, its readers and a jury of ICT professionals and thought leaders.

Back in 2016, Awingu won the Data News “Startup of the Year” Award. Hence, we see last night’s honor as a sign of recognition of our maturity and growth within the industry in the past 6 years. Given the fact that we were running against household names such as Delaware and Dell Technologies in the “Digital Workplace Innovator” category, we are all the more inspired to continue our mission to aid companies with their workspace transformation by making secure remote work available anywhere, on any device.