Hanna Hennig will speak on the main stage December 9 at Zenith Live 2020, the Zscaler Annual Cloud Summit.
The pandemic has forced organizations to accelerate digital transformation: Enterprises that seize the moment to embrace a perimeter-less security model will be more agile, profitable, and competitive. That rings true for Siemens AG CIO Hannah Hennig, who joined the company right before COVID changed everything.
"[It was a] very exciting time to be thrown into the 'cold water,'" noted Hennig, speaking with Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry last month at the Zscaler CXO Summit. Hennig had "to ensure our company was still productive" when COVID hit, and that meant enabling 300,000+ Siemens' employees to work from home.
She looked to Zscaler—in particular, Zscaler Private Access (ZPA)—to provide scalable, secure remote connectivity for the Siemens workforce. Hennig had to accelerate ZPA rollout: "We moved over [from VPN to ZPA for 300K employees] in days. Not weeks. Days."
Siemens' successful (and aggressive!) pivot to a work-from-anywhere (WFA) workforce represented the first time in company history such a dramatic IT change had been introduced so rapidly. But for Hennig, it had two additional impacts: It both provided perspective, but also raised expectations.
Ultimately, the "better flexibility, better security, even better performance" Siemens now enjoys with Zscaler comes down to a very practical element of the Siemens transformation journey. "
"The other part, it's all about people," concludes Hennig. "We IT folks we need to understand the technology, we need to pick the right technology, but we also need to ensure that those who we provide the technology and solutions for, that we are also taking them with us."
Hear the rest of the story directly from Siemens CIO Hanna Hennig when she speaks on the main stage at Zenith Live 2020. This year, the world’s premier cloud summit goes virtual and free December 8–10. You’ll get the opportunity to engage with Hanna Hennig and IT leaders from Unilever, Sandvik, DB Schenker, Testco, and many more.
