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Background
The Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture of the State Administration of Taxation (hereafter referred to as the Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture) is an agency of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China and is under the jurisdiction of the Guizhou Provincial Taxation Bureau. It is responsible for the collection and administration of taxation in Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou Province.
As part of its efforts to make the government better-structured, more efficient, and service-oriented, the State Council reformed the national taxation collection and administration system by merging provincial and sub-provincial tax authorities in 2018. Under the guidance of national policies, the Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture completed a major merger of state and local tax agencies, with the formation of several new departments and business units.
Challenge
As a result of the reorganization, the Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture faced a challenge: compatibility between state and local taxation at both the business and IT level. To resolve this issue and optimize services, the Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture needed to overhaul its IT infrastructure.
In recent years, the Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture has increased its investment in local data-driven services. By enabling citizens and businesses to file their taxes and claim for exemptions online, the Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture aims to enhance convenience for its customers while simultaneously improving operational efficiency for its staff.
The Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture also recognized a powerful opportunity to use digital services to boost the efficiency and accuracy of the tax-collection process. For example, using big data analytics could help identify potential cases of tax fraud, and enable government employees to spend more of their time on value-added investigation work rather than time-consuming data processing.
To satisfy stringent information security requirements for government agencies, the Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture must ensure that sensitive data is never exposed to the public Internet. To achieve this objective, the organization previously provided two separate physical workstations for each employee—one connected to the internal network, and one connected to the public Internet.
As well as driving up the cost and complexity of the management and maintenance, the Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture knew that the aging workstations would make it difficult to launch and scale its new generation of analytics-driven services in Qianxinan Prefecture. To solve the challenge, the Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture decided to replace its 200 physical machines with an efficient, future-ready virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution.
In the long term, we see that cloud services will play a key role in our overall approach to service delivery for taxpayers in the province. To contain costs and facilitate our future journey to cloud, we were keen to embrace VDI technology.” —Wu Dengyu, Chief of Information Management Center, Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture, State Administration of Taxation
Why Lenovo? Cost-Effective Server Platform for High-Performance VDI
After reviewing VDI solutions from several vendors, the Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture selected Lenovo to deliver its new IT infrastructure. Based on three Lenovo ThinkSystem SR860 servers with high-performance 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors running the VMware Horizon VDI solution, the new solution also replaces 200 physical machines with 100 Lenovo V300 G3 thin clients.
By connecting the Lenovo V300 G3 thin clients with 50 monitors and keyboard, video, and mouse (KVM) switches, the Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture enables its employees to seamlessly switch between desktop environments connected to the public Internet or internal network. Thanks to fine-grained peripheral management, the Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture ensures that only privileged user accounts can use external USB devices—helping to protect sensitive data and safeguard internal systems from malware.
The Lenovo sales and pre-sales teams were very professional and answered all our technical questions clearly and in depth. The team went out of their way to design a VDI solution that met all of our operational needs, which was one of the key reasons we selected Lenovo.”—Wu Dengyu, Chief of Information Management Center, Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture, State Administration of Taxation
Proven Partnership
In partnership with Lenovo Professional Services, the Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture successfully deployed, configured, tested, and switched over to its new VDI solution quickly and with minimal impact on day-to-day work for government employees. Thanks to targeted knowledge-transfer sessions from the Lenovo team, the Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture helped its teams to familiarize themselves with the new solutions quickly—contributing to a short time-to-value for its investment in VDI.
Many of our office staff are not technology experts, and thanks to our VDI solution from Lenovo, there’s no need for them to be—the new platform is highly intuitive and easy to use. Most importantly, we now have the compute performance to drive demanding big-data analytics to enhance our collections processes.”—Wu Dengyu, Chief of Information Management Center, Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture, State Administration of Taxation
Results
Since deploying the new VDI environment, the Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture has dramatically reduced the cost and complexity of IT management and maintenance. At the same time, the organization has slashed its power requirements, contributing to a 30% lower total cost of ownership.1
By equipping government employees with high-performance virtual desktop environments, the Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture has also opened the door to smart taxation. For example, the new solution makes it easier and faster for employees to mine tax data—enabling them to develop rebate policies for different types of taxes and more intelligently apply the rebates to citizens and businesses across the region.
With an efficient and secure VDI infrastructure underpinning its operations, the Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture is in a strong position to integrate cloud services into its existing environments cost-effectively, and with minimal impact on end users.
- Consolidates 200 physical machines into 100 thin clients.
- Delivers a 30% reduction in total cost of ownership.1
- Enhances information security with fine-grained management of user permissions.
Our Lenovo VDI solution met all of our key requirements at an extremely competitive price point, and we’ve not encountered a single technical issue since we went live.” —Wu Dengyu, Chief of Information Management Center, Taxation Bureau of Qianxinan Autonomous Prefecture, State Administration of Taxation