Case Study
How Capitalize Cut Infrastructure Costs 67% by Replacing Azure Virtual Desktop with Blue Border
The Challenge:
- Unreliable performance — Sessions dropped and lagged daily, leaving agents unable to connect and disrupting operations across two countries
- Inflated costs — AVD licensing plus MSP management ran ~3x the cost of alternatives
- MSP-introduced risk — Config errors, duplicate accounts, and onboarding mistakes created security exposure that went undetected for months
- Workarounds that backfired — When connectivity failed, admins punched holes in security boundaries just to get agents online — defeating the purpose of the VDI
The Results:
- 67% cost reduction — Eliminated AVD licensing and MSP overhead, cutting infrastructure spend to roughly one-third of what they were paying before
- Connectivity issues dropped to near zero — IT support tickets for session failures went from a daily occurrence to almost nothing within weeks of migration
- Agents noticed the difference — A team that reliably surfaced complaints went quiet on IT issues — and started sending compliments instead
- SOC 2 audit passed without issue — Blue Border satisfied the same compliance controls as AVD, at a fraction of the infrastructure overhead
About Capitalize
Capitalize is a modern fintech platform that simplifies 401(k) rollovers for individuals and employers. Headquartered in New York City, the company operates with customer service teams across the US and the Philippines, handling sensitive financial data for thousands of clients. As a SOC 2-compliant organization, Capitalize maintains rigorous security standards across every endpoint and every employee.
The Challenge: A Virtual Desktop That Created More Problems Than It Solved
When your customer service team handles people’s retirement savings, reliability isn’t a nice-to-have – it’s everything. But for Tim Seibert, Senior Operations Manager at Capitalize, every morning started with an open question: would Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) actually work today?
Capitalize was using AVD to maintain a clean, secure environment for their remote customer service staff – a team of 75 and growing, split between the US and the Philippines. The logic was sound: a fully managed virtual desktop kept sensitive data off personal and unmanaged devices, and helped satisfy the company’s SOC 2 compliance requirements.
In reality, the experience was a constant source of friction. Connectivity dropped without warning. Sessions ran slow and laggy, especially at the start of the day. Agents would arrive at their workstations unable to connect, and the domino effect hit the whole operation.
“Azure usage was probably 3x the cost of Venn – and that’s not including what we were paying our MSP to manage it.”
The cost picture was also difficult. AVD licensing, combined with the overhead of a managed service provider (MSP) to run and support it, was running roughly three times what the company would eventually pay for an alternative. And that MSP relationship had its own problems: accidental outages, configuration errors, duplicate account creation, onboarding typos. The instability wasn’t just frustrating; it was quietly creating security exposure.
“We didn’t have as good visibility as we wanted,” Tim recalled. When agents couldn’t connect in the morning, the practical response was to start poking holes – workarounds to get people up and running that undermined the very security boundaries the VDI was meant to enforce. When Capitalize transitioned to a new MSP, they discovered a significant number of security loopholes that had gone unnoticed under the old setup.
Tim knew what he was looking for: a stable environment where he didn’t have to come in at 9 AM to a surprise. He also needed it to be cost-competitive with what Citrix alternatives were charging. The search for something better led him to Venn.
The Solution: Blue Border™ on the Devices Workers Already Had
Blue Border™ is a secure enclave that installs directly on an employee’s or contractor’s own PC or Mac. Work activity runs inside the enclave – protected, company-controlled, isolated – while personal activity stays completely outside it. There’s no virtual machine to maintain, no remote desktop to connect to, and no VDI session that can drop in the middle of a shift.
For Capitalize, the fit was immediate. Their US remote workers had been issued Chromebooks – adequate hardware, but a particularly painful combination with VDI. A slow virtual desktop running on a slow device produced an experience that Tim described as “a computer within a computer.” It was naturally sluggish, and when sessions lagged or dropped, productivity stopped.
The team made a hardware decision in parallel: migrate US remote workers from those Chromebooks to MacBook Airs. Paired with Venn, the result was a fundamentally different experience: local apps running at native speed, inside a secure enclave, on hardware that actually felt fast.
“I got nothing but complaints from people all the time – and this is the first time I’m getting compliments.”
For the Philippines team, the impact was also significant. Running Blue Border on locally procured Windows laptops, agents went from the unpredictability of a remote session – dependent on cross-Pacific connectivity and often bogged down by latency – to a local compute experience that performed like any well-configured workstation. No virtual dependency. No morning connection friction.
And critically, the security posture improved – not despite the change, but because of it. Blue Border gave Capitalize’s IT leadership clear visibility into what was happening inside the work enclave, without requiring surveillance of employees’ personal activity. The workarounds and loopholes that had accumulated around AVD’s reliability failures had no equivalent here.
The Results
The changes Tim had been hoping for materialized quickly after the transition to Venn.
Capitalize cut its infrastructure cost by roughly two-thirds – from a combined VPN, AVD licensing and MSP bill that was running approximately 3x what the company pays for Blue Border today. Across a 75-person team, that’s a material budget line recovered without any reduction in security posture.
Reliability stopped being a morning conversation. In the weeks after migration, IT support tickets related to connectivity and session failures dropped to near zero compared to what had been a daily occurrence under AVD. The 9 AM scramble simply disappeared. Agents started their shifts on machines that worked, running applications that responded like local software.
The team noticed. Tim manages an operations environment where feedback tends to surface when things go wrong. After the migration, the feedback flipped. “I got nothing but complaints from people all the time,” he said, “and this is the first time I’m getting compliments.”
Capitalize’s most recent SOC 2 audit covered the Blue Border deployment without issue. The secure enclave model – company data and applications isolated locally, never touching the personal environment – satisfies the same audit controls that previously required a fully managed virtual desktop. Same compliance posture, but for a fraction of the infrastructure overhead.
Looking Ahead
Capitalize handles retirement savings for thousands of clients across the US – the kind of operation where security failures and compliance gaps have real consequences. They’re now expanding into North Carolina, building on a foundation that doesn’t require VDI infrastructure or an MSP to keep it running. Today they run that operation in Blue Border, at a third of what AVD cost them, with no morning fire drills and no configuration mistakes to fix. The infrastructure got simpler. The security got tighter. The costs went down.
