Always-On VPN Migration for a Non-Profit Financial Institution

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Key Outcome Immediate performance relief + complete infrastructure redesign — eliminating daily disruptions during critical tax season

The Client

Our client is a non-profit financial institution with approximately 100 users who depend on reliable, secure access to their data and business applications every day. As a non-profit, controlling operating costs while maintaining high service standards is a constant priority — making technology decisions that are both effective and cost-efficient essential to their mission.

For several years, the organization had operated a Remote Desktop environment hosted on AWS, giving staff access to applications and data through a Terminal Server infrastructure. While functional in its early days, this setup had grown increasingly problematic as the organization’s usage and cloud hosting costs expanded over time.

The Situation

By the time the organization came to us, their AWS-hosted Terminal Server environment had become a significant financial burden. Monthly cloud hosting costs had escalated well beyond what the organization had initially projected, with no clear path to reducing them within their existing architecture. To make matters worse, end users had been experiencing noticeable and increasing performance degradation — slower application response times, laggy remote sessions, and general frustration that was beginning to affect productivity.

The organization needed a fundamentally different approach: one that would dramatically reduce their cloud hosting expenditure, restore — and ideally improve — the speed and responsiveness their staff experienced daily, and maintain the secure remote connectivity their distributed workforce required.

Our Solution

After a thorough assessment of the organization’s environment, user workflows, and infrastructure, Integrated Computer Services proposed migrating away from the Terminal Server model entirely in favor of an Always-On VPN solution. Rather than hosting computing resources in the cloud and streaming sessions to thin clients, the Always-On VPN approach shifts the computing power to users’ local machines — which were more than capable of running their applications natively — while providing seamless, secure, and persistent connectivity back to the organization’s core systems and data.

Our team designed and executed the full migration: configuring the Always-On VPN infrastructure, deploying and validating client connectivity across all 100 users, migrating data access pathways from the AWS environment, and decommissioning the Terminal Server setup in a controlled and staged process that minimized any disruption to daily operations.

Throughout the project, we prioritized change management — communicating clearly with users about what was changing and why, providing straightforward guidance on the new workflow, and being available to address any issues in the immediate post-migration period.

The Outcome

From the moment the migration was complete, users noticed an immediate and significant improvement in application speed and overall responsiveness — a direct result of running applications locally rather than through a streamed remote session. Beyond the performance gains, the organization achieved a 50% reduction in monthly cloud hosting costs, freeing up meaningful budget that could be redirected toward their mission. The Always-On VPN solution continues to provide the organization with reliable, secure remote connectivity — at a fraction of what they were previously paying.