Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 33 | Page 60

CASE STUDY or laptops, and not be constrained by the bandwidth limitation,” said Tillson. The solution worked as planned and enabled the workers in China to access the applications they needed far more quickly and efficiently than what would have been possible using the previous remote access solution. Global rollout to anticipate a global crisis As the COVID-19 virus began expanding outwards from China, TT Electronics had to move quickly to make a decision on its remote access solution. Foreseeing the global remote working situation that was, at this point, still a few weeks away, TT Electronics made the move to extend ZPA to the majority of its employees globally. “We needed to roll it out quickly. We were really concerned the current solution we had in place just wouldn’t be sufficient. The bandwidth issues, the usability problems – Zscaler doesn’t have any of that, it just works and that’s what we needed,” said Tillson. TT Electronics rapidly set up RDS in the majority of its sites and installed the ZPA client on corporate machines in order to enable home working for its employees within the time span of around three weeks. Turning away from traditional VPN In March 2020, after a three-week deployment period, 3,000 TT Electronics staff were able to access their applications from home securely and continue working as usual, when many other companies globally were still struggling to maintain application availability for their remote workers. “ZPA has been a real game-changer for us. Traditional VPN is always difficult to configure, it requires hardware on-site, it’s difficult to scale and there are bandwidth constraints between the remote access network and our MPLS to consider. We wouldn’t have been able to have more than a dozen employees working from home using a traditional VPN, but ZPA has given us the security and the flexibility we needed to enable remote working at the scale we suddenly needed,” said Tillson. Making IT look easy As is often the case with IT in the enterprise, end-users and the leadership team don’t necessarily see or understand the scale of the work being done behind the scenes – they just appreciate it when it works as intended. In the case of Tillson and his team, however, feedback from the wider organisation has been incredibly positive. “All of our users are actually amazed at how they can work from home with ZPA. They 60 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com