The story in a nutshell

  • Bakkafrost, one of the largest salmon producers in the world, needed a scalable, compliant, and user-friendly remote connectivity solution to support its expanding business and regulatory needs.
  • The highly automated fish farming industry requires 24/7 IT system uptime to prevent impacts on sensitive livestock and business success.
  • Bakkafrost implemented TeamViewer Tensor for seamless remote connectivity, enhancing convenience and operational efficiency.
  • Tensor provided compliance with regulations such as NIS2, scalability, security, and unattended access, improving system monitoring and management.
  • Tensor’s auditability and security features support Bakkafrost’s goal to achieve its own ISO 27001 certification.
  • The IT landscape became more resilient, scalable, and easier to maintain, helping to always deliver the freshest salmon globally.

Background

As a leading producer of superior quality salmon with an expanding international business, Faroe-based Bakkafrost exports its product to international markets, including the UK, continental Europe, Southeast Asia and the US. Due to the sensitive and fresh nature of its product, Bakkafrost’s business challenges include close, seamless monitoring and streamlined logistics to always deliver the highest quality and freshness from the Faroese and Scottish shores to its global customers.

Challenges

While fish farming still involves manual labor in many parts, the industry embraced digital transformation long ago and began automating and digitalizing various processes along the value chain. Today, it is a highly automated business that relies on the latest IoT equipment, such as connected sensors, cameras or feeding machines—both in the six hatcheries as well as in the 45 large offshore marine sites for the grown fish.

But with more automation comes more responsibility for the IT teams to keep the systems up and running 24/7. Any prolonged downtime can seriously impact the sensitive livestock, such as the eggs in the hatcheries, and ultimately the success of the business.

Bakkafrost’s IT team is responsible for the set-up, maintenance and monitoring of the IoT systems as well as the 800 standard IT workplaces. With both the IT landscape and the business expanding, they needed a remote connectivity solution that would better meet requirements:

  • Scalability: Enterprise-grade solution that scales with the company’s growing business, including its expansion into Scotland.
  • Compliance and documentation: With new EU regulations such as NIS2 in place, and aiming at an ISO 27001 certification, Bakkafrost needed detailed logging and auditability for all remote sessions.
  • Speed and ease-of-use: Eliminate the slow VNC solution as well as a legacy remote desktop program and consolidate on a single remote connectivity solution that would cover all use cases, ensuring reliable, secure, yet fast operations.
  • 24/7 monitoring: A solution that would provide quick unattended access to devices, especially during off-hours and night shifts when staff were not on site—for example, accessing dashboards that monitor the status of the fish tanks.

Helgi Waag IT Security Engineer at Bakkafrost

“Switching to Tensor has greatly helped the IT department on our path to achieving the ISO 27001 certification and NIS2 compliance. On the operational side, the ability to access systems remotely and efficiently, even during off-hours, has significantly reduced downtime and improved our team’s response time.”

Solution and Results

To solve all these challenges in one go, Bakkafrost’s IT team turned to TeamViewer Tensor as the single remote connectivity solution of their choice. “TeamViewer is a very low-friction solution that gives us a high level of convenience. Most of the time it’s a quick double-click and we can check into the remote device”, says Kristian Eli Zachariassen, Group IT Director at Bakkafrost.

After a seamless upgrade to Tensor, Bakkfrost now benefits from:

  • Regulatory compliance: Tensor provides the necessary logging capabilities to comply with NIS2 regulations, the ISO 27001 certification and other regulatory requirements, ensuring accountability for all remote actions.
  • Scalability, security and ease of use: Tensor helps Bakkafrost grow its business and scale the number of supported devices and users. At the same time, legacy solutions were removed, reducing complexity and improving security, including mandatory MFA.
  • Unattended access: Allowed IT staff to remotely monitor and manage critical systems from anywhere, even during off-hours.
  • Enhanced automation: Seamlessly access and monitor IT workplaces and operational connected IoT devices.

With TeamViewer Tensor in place, Bakkafrost’s IT team has successfully made the IT landscape more resilient to interruptions, scalable and easier to maintain. In this way, the group’s IT team contributes to Bakkafrost’s business goal of being a world-class company in the salmon business—always delivering the freshest product to its global customers.

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