International service provider
Homeworking
solution for 10,000 employees

On Thursday, March 12, 2020, our Prime Minister Mark Rutte got the big word out: “We need to work from home as much as possible! At that moment, some 10,000 employees of an international service provider in industrial technology were scratching their heads. Because at that time, they were still working in the office, just like the rest of the Netherlands. Could we, during that weekend, think of a solution?

The result

On Monday, we started simply based on the existing infrastructure. At that time, it had a capacity of up to 200 employees. And by the end of March 2020, we had a reliable VPN network in a secure cloud environment up and running. So within 2 weeks, 10,000 colleagues could work from anywhere on earth, sheltered in their secure, virtual environment.

The approach

The first thought was to scale up all lines in all data centers, including in AACR. Both the VPN concentrators as well as all routers and firewalls had to be replaced. That was the only way we could properly handle the traffic of 10,000 people. But to accomplish that, two weeks are far too short.

In the end, we chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as our platform. The existing infrastructure is spread across four physical data centers and mirrored in four AWS regions. By duplicating the VPN equipment in these data centers in “lanes” and also scaling horizontally, you do the same thing sixteen times. This creates the capacity to properly facilitate the homework traffic of the 10,000 people.

Also useful to know

One Zero IT’s knowledge partners in this project are Bauhaus Architech and MatrixMind. The task force specially assembled for this project consisted of 9 consultants in the areas of IT infrastructure, network, workspace, application management and cloud. Are you interested in the technical background of this particular project? Then listen to the podcast on Packet Pushers by Greg Ferrero featuring our chapter lead (and front man in this project) Robin here.

Do you also want to ensure security within your IT environment when employees work from multiple remote locations? One Zero IT builds secure IT environments based on Zero Trust, from architecture to implementation. Contact us and share your IT challenge with us!