But facing restrictions at ports to a shortage of air freight slots, transportation companies are having to find their way around a fast-changing logistics landscape. Journeys that would normally take a few days are taking weeks.

Transportation companies are used to changing variables and continually update their continuity plans accordingly. However, none could foresee a global pandemic that would shut down airline services, close borders and see entire workforces around the globe telecommuting. International transportation companies have been quick to see the scale of the problem that the pandemic is creating. Freight is having to be continually re-routed and diverted in what has fast turned into a transportation nightmare.

This long-term transportation customer asked Orange Business to accelerate its digital transformation to support 30,000+ knowledge workers working from home to keep operations running securely and as seamlessly as possible, despite the huge disruption.


 

Enabling freight to keep moving

Due to the nature of its business and dispersed workforce, this customer normally has 28,000 people working remotely. Instead, the company needed to quickly get 30,000 working securely from home to keep freight moving and satisfy its customers’ transportation demands.

The company had been looking at different solutions to support home working. The pandemic intensified discussions and, as part of its digital transformation, opted to deploy Zscaler Private Access (ZPA). Orange set up 38,000 ZPA licenses. This solution allows companies to provide remote access to their internal applications and services while ensuring the security of their networks. With users using their own private Internet connections, there are also no network bottlenecks to deal with.

Previously, users had been using a Cisco solution, but the company wanted to move to a cloud-based platform as part of its cloud strategy. ZPA, based on Zscaler’s global cloud platform is an easy to deploy, cost effective solution. Within eight days of looking at the solution, Orange deployed 10,000 working seats. The company now has access capacity of 40,000 seats if it needs them.

Unlike VPNs, which require remote workers to connect to the enterprise network to access enterprise applications, ZPA enables the company to quickly give its users policy-based secure access only to the business applications they require to do their jobs. A dashboard provides 360-degree visibility into the users’ behaviors and applications as well as the health of applications and servers. ZPA has provided a very stable environment for the company to run Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams for its collaboration needs.

Cloud, the enabler

Due to the nature of its business, the company had followed the health emergency from day one in China. Once it reached pandemic status, however, COVID-19 created some very unpredictable logistics scenarios for the company. A cloud approach to remote access via the Zscaler ZPA has given the company the flexibility, scalability and security it needs to keep essential supplies rolling to their destinations.