From Legacy VDI to Cloud: What DESNZ actually did — and what it unlocked

Government IT teams are caught between two slow-moving collisions: legacy VDI contracts expiring with no appetite for like-for-like renewal, and device refresh cycles that are hard to justify against flat or declining budgets. At DigiGov, Emilie MacMullen from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) and Liam Birch from Nerdio will share how one organisation moved through both, and what it made possible on the other side.

The problem wasn't just the technology

At DESNZ, roughly 1,000 analysts were running serious workloads on low-spec government laptops. The hardware constrained them. The legacy VDI estate beneath it constrained them further. A small engineering team that should have been driving service improvement was instead locked into an endless cycle of maintenance.

This will be familiar to most public sector IT leaders: infrastructure built for a different era, serving a workforce that has long since outgrown it, held together by effort and necessity rather than design.

What the migration made possible

With Nerdio managing the AVD environment, DESNZ cut AVD costs by 80%. Virtual machines that previously ran around the clock shifted to demand-based, auto-scaled compute. Patching became automated. Image releases moved from quarterly to monthly. Engineers gained real visibility into usage and spend through dashboards that simply hadn't existed before.

The numbers matter, but the shift in how the team operates matters just as much. Analysts who previously hit a ceiling on what their hardware could handle now have access to compute that scales to the work. The engineering team, no longer locked into repetitive maintenance, is focused on service improvement. And the cost headroom created by the migration is funding modernisation rather than being absorbed by the same overhead it replaced.

The hardware question changed shape

Device refresh cycles didn't disappear, but they became a different problem. When compute is delivered from the cloud, endpoint specification matters less. Existing devices stay in service longer. The refresh cycle slows, not through procurement sleight of hand, but because the dependency on local hardware has fundamentally changed. A real, recurring saving without procurement risk.

The wider picture for public sector

Liam Birch joins the session to set the broader context: where public sector organisations currently sit in this transition, and how to extract genuine value from a Microsoft investment that many have already made but haven't fully activated.

The licensing is often already in place. AVD is included. The question isn't whether the capability exists; it's how to operationalise it in a way that reduces cost, reduces manual overhead, and improves the service end users receive.

For organisations still running legacy VDI or early AVD environments that are costing more than they should, this session is a practical look at what the path forward looks like, from an organisation that has already walked it.

Join the conversation at DigiGov

If your organisation is facing a VDI renewal decision, struggling to justify a device refresh, or running an AVD environment that isn't delivering the value it should, this session is built for you.

Find Nerdio at Stand G16 to continue the conversation, or come with the specific challenge you're trying to solve.

 Emilie MacMullen, Cloud Based Analytical Service Product and Infrastructure Lead, DESNZ 

 Liam Birch, Head of Public Sector, Nerdio