Note: This case study is illustrative. Client details are anonymised and figures are representative of typical OAS engagements.
The challenge
A national asset management firm with offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town relied on an on-premises Citrix farm built almost a decade earlier. The platform delivered core portfolio and trading applications to roughly 450 users, but it was showing its age.
Logon times averaged over three minutes. Hardware was approaching end of life. The legacy licensing model faced the Citrix LAS transition deadline. Above all, the FSCA Joint Standard on cybersecurity and cyber resilience demanded controls — session auditing, documented recovery capability, board-level reporting — that the old environment could not evidence.
The firm could not tolerate downtime. Portfolio managers and dealers needed uninterrupted access through every phase of the migration.
The approach
OAS applied its six-phase engagement model, beginning with a full discovery audit of the existing farm, application estate, and licensing position.
The assessment recommended Citrix DaaS with workloads hosted in Microsoft Azure's South African regions — Johannesburg primary, Cape Town for disaster recovery. Data sovereignty was preserved, and POPIA residency requirements were met without exception.
As a Citrix Platinum partner since 1987, OAS designed the target environment around the firm's actual usage patterns. Machine catalogues were right-sized from monitoring data rather than guesswork. Profile management was rebuilt to eliminate the logon delays that frustrated users daily.
Migration ran as a phased rollout. A pilot group of 40 users validated every application — including a temperamental legacy reporting tool — before each business unit moved in planned waves. The legacy farm remained available as a fallback until the final wave completed.
The outcome
- 450 users migrated with zero unplanned downtime across a 14-week programme
- Average logon times cut by 60%, from over three minutes to under 70 seconds
- Citrix LAS licensing transition completed ahead of the April 2026 deadline
- Session recording, watermarking, and DR failover documentation supporting FSCA compliance reporting
- Infrastructure refresh costs avoided by retiring the end-of-life hardware estate
OAS now manages the environment under an ongoing agreement, with quarterly business reviews and vCIO advisory feeding the firm's technology roadmap.