CASE STUDY for what the programme would deliver , why and how the change would be managed .
This preparation stood Sandvik in good stead to make a change when the pandemic situation demanded it . In less than five days , 20,000 Sandvik employees around the world were migrated over to the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform . Zscaler Private Access , a building block of the platform , was tested over the weekend with 30 users and subsequently rolled out to equip employees working from home . It was a wholesale change to Sandvik ’ s network approach , implemented at speed , but employees quickly realised that they could still get access and do their work and the change was well received .
“ There was a lot of trust to take that decision on the Friday ,” said Kemi . “ We could have increased capacity , but we turned the company inside out from a network perspective and it just worked .”
The transformation enabled Sandvik ’ s global lines of business to keep running smoothly , despite the challenges of the pandemic . Longer-term , it equips Sandvik with a convenient , flexible and scalable solution that secures remote access , while minimising attack surfaces and access barriers .
Continuous evolution
Naturally , the programme did not conclude once the new solution had gone live . Included among the team ’ s many activities was the dismantling of the legacy infrastructure , to contribute to the initiative ’ s cost efficiency . Without a clear line of sight to retiring legacy solutions , Sebastian explains , the company will incur ongoing costs supporting a diminishing population of users yet to migrate .
As a large organisation , committed to enhancing customer productivity , profitability and sustainability , Sandvik evolves with the times to maintain its competitiveness . Change is a constant for all organisations and with that comes continuous learning and improvement . Kemi gives three pieces of advice for major change programme managers embarking on similar transformation initiatives .
“ Firstly , sell the long-term goal . You need to talk about what you want to accomplish , rather than IT . Secondly , establish a team made up of the right people , from across the company and lastly , instead of a large preparation programme , make the change and fix the small problems you will have . Even if you plan for 12 or 18 months , you will still run into problems . Be flexible enough that you can adapt when you need to .”
Sebastian Kemi , Chief Information Security Officer at Sandvik , discusses the project in more detail and outlines the benefits of working with Zscaler .
What were the driving factors behind the decision to partner with Zscaler – what was it about its offering that appealed to you ?
As an organisation , innovation and productivity have been a central focus for Sandvik for over 160 years . Within my role , I focus on supporting digitalisation for the business . I recognised it was instrumental to modernise the legacy network infrastructure . Deploying the cloudbased Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange was part of this journey as it gave us the tools we needed to go directly and securely to the Internet without the administrative burden of managing hardware . We were able to achieve the desired flexibility and agility we were looking for to enable the transformation of our architecture as the foundation of a cloud-first approach .
What did you hope to achieve when commencing the project and have you delivered on this ?
We started the relationship with Zscaler eight years ago and since then it has been a constant journey in support of our digitisation strategy . Our mission has been to carry out a complete network redesign to provide secure access on an application level rather than a network one . Globally we had a complex IT structure , where traffic had to be backhauled from branch offices to regional data centres and then sent through an additional security layer . The security hardware added to this complexity not only through constant life cycle management , but also to our performance issues .
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