CASE STUDY
The beginning of the global lockdown
period saw businesses scrambling to
ensure workers could perform their
roles remotely. With so little time between
rumblings of a pandemic, and the lockdown
itself coming into place, large businesses
with hundreds or thousands of staff situated
across the globe in particular struggled to
get the correct combination of technologies
in place to ensure Business Continuity,
functionality and security.
This could well have been the case for TT
Electronics, a global provider of engineered
electronics for performance-critical
applications. Headquartered in Woking,
UK, TT Electronics employs around 5,000
people across 29 locations spread over
the UK and Europe, North America and
Asia. Its transformation to Zscaler’s cloud
security platform, including Zscaler Private
Access, enabled TT Electronics to deploy a
remote working strategy with no disruption
to the business.
No quick fixes
With so many locations and employees
across different regulatory boundaries, quickfixing
a remote working programme at this
scale would be nigh-on impossible and likely
result in costly downtime for the business.
Thankfully for TT Electronics, Jaye Tillson, its
Head of Architecture, was already running a
Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) proof of concept
(POC) globally in early 2020 to ensure that
employees travelling to China especially,
could access the data they needed but also
be restricted in what they could access to
abide by international data legislation.
“It just so happened that this POC took
place when the need arose suddenly. We
had some employees travelling across
regions and we had some specifics that we
wanted to test. Firstly, that people could
get seamless access to the applications
they needed. We also wanted to ensure
these travelling users could be restricted
on what they could access. So for instance,
if a US user was in the US, they should
be allowed to access US data, but if they
travelled to China, it would be required
to block this restricted content to comply
with legislation and export controls. Then
COVID-19 came along and complicated
things even further,” said Tillson.
Remote access in China
In February 2020, due to the extent of
the spread of the Coronavirus in China, TT
Electronics’ sites in the country were closed
and its employees sent to work from home.
This, however, was fraught with challenges.
“For our employees, trying to work remotely
was really difficult. People outside of the POC
OUR IT VISION IS
TO PROVIDE THE
IT SOLUTIONS
AND SERVICES
THAT ENABLE TT
TO BE THE GO-
TO STRATEGIC
PARTNER OF THE
WORLD’S TOP
TECHNOLOGY
BUSINESSES.
were still on the old remote access solution
and it wasn’t working particularly well due
to bandwidth restrictions. With such low
bandwidth for each user, they would need to
download presentations before a call which
wasn’t user-friendly and meant documents
quickly getting out of sync. The connectivity
just wasn’t good enough to be connected to
VPN and share documents while attending
conference calls. It was unworkable.
“We also needed some of our employees to
be able to use their home machines because
not all of them had company desktops
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