Business Continuity in the Cloud: Takeda Pharmaceutical Company's Remote Access Scaling
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Event-Driven Application
- Cybersecurity & Privacy - Network Security
Applicable Industries
- Pharmaceuticals
- Telecommunications
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Remote Control
- Tamper Detection
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Hardware Design & Engineering Services
About The Customer
Takeda Pharmaceutical Company is a Tokyo-based pharmaceutical firm, recognized as the oldest in the world. The company has a significant global presence, with over 52,000 employees spread across 110 countries and 575 locations. Takeda's 2019 acquisition of Shire PLC expanded its footprint to more than sixty office and research locations worldwide. The company's IT team, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, manages systems for its global workforce of over 70,000 employees. Takeda is a values-driven company, with a focus on internal development and the use of proprietary technologies, applications, and intellectual property.
The Challenge
Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, the oldest pharmaceutical firm in the world, faced a significant challenge following its merger with Shire PLC. The merger resulted in a 'quite-disjointed' network architecture that needed to be integrated and secured. The company's IT team, led by CISO Mike Towers, was tasked with managing systems for a global workforce of over 70,000 employees spread across 110 countries. The company had begun rolling out Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) in late 2018 to secure employee internet egress via the cloud and provide a consistent user experience. However, the merger accelerated Takeda's migration to the cloud, pushing the company to move towards a Zero Trust, user-to-destination model as quickly as possible. The challenge was to provide secure employee connectivity for every type of worker via local internet breakouts, while maintaining a consistent policy across all locations.
The Solution
Takeda standardized on ZIA, displacing its 'next-generation' firewalls. This gave the company greater flexibility in enabling secure employee connectivity. Zscaler's policy-based administrative controls helped Takeda become more agile, allowing the company to maintain a consistent policy regardless of where employees were located. In 2019, Takeda began rolling out Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) to deliver secure connectivity to internal resources. This was a significant cultural change for the company, but it allowed Takeda to extend remote access and retire VPN hardware. The company shifted its control and provisioning approach, focusing on providing employees with the applications they needed to get their work done, rather than where those applications resided. When the coronavirus outbreak hit in early 2020, Takeda was able to quickly pivot to ZPA, enabling the company to secure its transition to fully-remote operations.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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