The story in a nutshell
- The Swiss energy and infrastructure group BKW is on course for growth and is centralizing its corporate IT.
- BKW was looking for a scalable solution for the remote support of thousands of workplaces.
- As a critical infrastructure company, BKW has the highest standards for IT security.
- TeamViewer's enterprise solution Tensor ensures granular access control with Conditional Access and comes with all the necessary certifications.
- A smooth rollout ensures high satisfaction among employees and users.
- The flexible, secure, scalable, and user-friendly solution positions company's IT for future growth.
Introduction
The Swiss energy and infrastructure group BKW is faced with the challenge of establishing a central corporate IT system that manages the workstations of employees both within the group and in a growing number of subsidiaries. For this, BKW needed a powerful remote support solution that meets the very high security standards of a critical infrastructure company and is also easy to integrate and scale. With the TeamViewer's enterprise solution, BKW's central IT team is now optimally positioned for this.
Challenges
With around 140 subsidiaries spread across 327 locations, shareholdings in ten countries, and over 11,500 employees, BKW is one of the largest energy and infrastructure companies in Switzerland and beyond.
However, the company's steady growth, particularly from acquisitions in various areas of the energy, building, and infrastructure sectors, brings with it a number of challenges. For example, Corporate IT must evolve into a centralized corporate IT department that acts as a service provider for BKW and its formerly independent subsidiaries. The tasks include the gradual conversion of systems to a centralized environment that will gradually enable cross-company collaboration.
"The main challenge is that practically all subsidiaries have different IT setups. The changeover to our group-wide standard workplace requires not only technical integration but also a lot of training and support on our part," says Roman Winzeler, Modern Workplace Specialist at BKW.
In this situation, a solution for simple and secure remote access in order to provide efficient IT support is crucial for the success of the transformation. In addition to the regular IT support for more than 5,000 BKW workplaces at hundreds of locations, the ongoing integration of new companies means a lot of additional administrative work for corporate IT. Some larger subsidiaries also have their own IT managers who are dependent on a reliable remote access solution. Additionally, authorized third-party providers should have time-limited remote access to individual BKW devices.
As an operator of critical infrastructure such as energy grids and power plants, BKW placed particular importance on security when searching for a suitable provider. The solution also needed to be easy to integrate and scalable in a corporate environment to accommodate future growth.
Roman Winzeler Modern Workplace Specialist at BKW
"The switch to Tensor was seamless; I'm really impressed. Everything we touched worked straight away — technically, everything went perfectly, and if a question did arise, TeamViewer's customer service was always very quick to help us.''
Solution
In view of the positive experience with TeamViewer on a smaller scale and the solution's ability to address the central security aspects of a corporate group, BKW decided in favor of TeamViewer's cloud-based enterprise suite, Tensor.
TeamViewer Tensor meets BKW's IT security requirements in several respects. These include certification in accordance with the IT security standard ISO 27001 and a cloud assessment that regulates data processing in the cloud.
In addition, corporate IT can now use the conditional access function of TeamViewer Tensor to granularly determine which user or unit receives which access rights. This centralized rights management is an important step towards increasing IT security throughout the company. For example, IT teams from subsidiaries can now only access devices belonging to their division, authorized employees are granted access to certain CAD workstations, or third-party providers are given one-off, time-limited access to individual devices in order to install a software update, for example.
TeamViewer Tensor also fulfills the requirements for scalability, integration, and automation that are indispensable in corporate structures such as the connection to BKW's single sign-on.
Result
With TeamViewer Tensor, BKW's Corporate IT has found the right remote support solution to perfectly support the transformation to an internal service provider. With its flexible scalability and comprehensive security features, TeamViewer strengthens the company's cybersecurity, and the team can continue to reliably support the growth of the entire company and its IT landscape in the future.
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