In the first quarter of 2020, it was the global Corona pandemic that demanded a rapid response from companies in all industries, to ensure business continuity – this was also the case for an internationally operating consumer goods enterprise. With the provision of the applications from a redundant cloud back-end and the possibility of accessing the services on personal devices, the consumer goods company was already well positioned to operate its business in an agile manner. The existing setup enabled the company to work without interruption by redirecting to the European domain. With the help of public cloud services, a new solution for the connectivity bottleneck in the U.S. was stablished within a short time.
What started out as a quick solution for remote working in the Corona phase turned out to be a future-oriented setup for the new normal.
Varun Dilip Tare, T-Systems
Companies from almost all industries were particularly challenged by the Corona pandemic. On the one hand, sales collapsed; on the other hand, standard processes and strategic projects had to be maintained to ensure business continuity. The complexity of this challenge increased even more because authorities in many countries, particularly the United States, required companies to close production sites and workplaces within just a few days. For an international consumer goods company, this had a major impact on its entire American business. Capacity for working from home was theoretically available, because the office applications were delivered in a scalable infrastructure from a regional cloud data center in the U.S., but the connectivity capacity required for the significantly increased concurrent access to the services was not sufficient – and the connectivity provider could not fix this in the short term. This would have been a severe blow to the productivity of the consumer goods company in the American region.
As the operator of the cloud back-end, T-Systems developed a short-term solution to ensure business continuity for the consumer goods manufacturer. In the first step, the access points of the American employees were redirected to the company’s European data center, run by T-Systems. Sufficient capacity for this was available in the wide area network. The employees remained able to work – albeit with a reduction in the user experience due to the longer latencies. Meanwhile, T-Systems worked with the network provider to develop a new solution for remote working for American employees. The solution is based on an architecture developed by T-Systems. Because it is based on public cloud services, it could be set up and commissioned within a few days. The solution comprises cloud-based networking appliances, which facilitate the end user connections. This implementation was done together with customer’s network service provider. After just two weeks, the employees’ access could be routed again to the U.S. data center. The user experience returned to the usual high level.
