Markus Sontheimer will speak on the main stage December 9 at the Zscaler annual cloud summit Zenith Live 2020.
Early investment in cloud transformation has paid (metaphorical) dividends for DB Schenker CIO/CDO Markus Sontheimer. But like many of his IT peers, he never expected to have to roll out cloud services so fast.
Sontheimer and his IT team manage systems and solutions infrastructure for the Essen, Germany-based global logistics company's 76,000 employees. Sontheimer describes the critical nature of DB Schenker's worldwide operations: "We have to cross borders. We have to ship from A to B, no matter what country it is, and no matter what it costs.”
Committing to the cloud
DB Schenker had begun its secure digital transformation in 2017, adopting Zscaler Internet Access as part of a broader shift to cloud-based solutions and SaaS.
And then the pandemic struck, forcing Sontheimer to lead the most agile IT pivot in company history. Employees—all employees—would have to work remotely. Sontheimer and DB Schenker SVP of Global Infrastructure Services Gerold Nagel recognized immediately that corporate VPN technology couldn't scale to accommodate the added data volumes generated by an entirely remote workforce.
"The disruption led us right away to ZPA [Zscaler Private Access]," notes Nagel. Sontheimer and Nagel quickly deployed ZPA, first moving more than 8,000 employees in China to remote access. The encouraging success of that rapid transition led Sontheimer and Nagel to accelerate ZPA rollout to the rest of the company and preserve business continuity.
Hear the rest of the story directly from DB Schenker CIO/CDO Markus Sontheimer when he 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 Markus Sontheimer and IT leaders from Unilever, Sandvik, Siemens, Testco, and many more.
DB Schenker’s secure digital transformation journey is chronicled in the book Securing Remote Work - Safeguarding Business Continuity with Zscaler, from which a portion of this article is excerpted.
Toph Whitmore is a transformation analyst at Zscaler
