Three questions, three answers: Torsten Müller
Torsten Müller has been the Head of Information Technology at Sartorius since November 2018. In this interview, he talks about the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and possible opportunities.
This article is posted on our Sartorius Blog.
Torsten, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced Sartorius employees around the world into their workspaces at home. What challenges does this create for an IT infrastructure?
That's right. For about seven weeks now, some 3,000 employees at Sartorius have been working from home. This was possible at short notice and without any problems because, for one thing, all these employees have been equipped with laptops and telephony has been running over Internet Protocol (IP) for quite a while. Moreover, we already purchased additional firewall systems in January, which could be seamlessly used to expand capacity in the wake of the crisis.
But there are challenges, too. One of the most urgent tasks was to ensure a consistently good and secure Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection for more remote sessions than ever before. Although many teams and systems already work in the cloud and do not need a VPN, we had a need for action here. We pulled out all the stops and, after a pragmatic interim solution, have now reached the point where all colleagues worldwide can automatically access all systems and data again when their laptops are booted up.
Security is also an important topic. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, we have seen a significant increase in phishing attacks. Colleagues around the world are well prepared for this, because we have done a lot of education about the topic, especially in the last year.
In short: Our interim conclusion after one and a half months is positive. We were well prepared - the investments made in recent years have paid off – and we were able to adjust where necessary.
Certainly, more questions and queries are coming up at the moment. How do you handle this?
The number of support requests has indeed increased significantly. We had a lucky hand with the timing here. At the beginning of March, we relaunched our IT service portal. Employees have always had the opportunity to submit service requests here - for example, to order new hardware and software or apply for access to diverse tools or network drives. Now, they can also contact the helpdesk in all languages and search for solutions to minor problems in the Knowledge Hub themselves. The platform is frequented a lot more now and is especially helpful when working from home – whether you just need a little hint or an expert to tackle a more complex issue.
With many employees working from home, digital-collaboration tools have come more into focus. What does this look like at Sartorius?
As a globally operating company, digital collaboration was of course already important to us when we did not have to work from home. Our headquarters are in Germany, the major growth markets are in Asia and America and we have ambitious growth targets. Our employees must be able to work as if they were sitting next to each other. And that's why we have invested here as well.
In January, we released a global standard toolset to unify collaboration throughout the Group. As part of this, we rolled out Microsoft teams worldwide, for example, and trained employees accordingly. Again, the timing - albeit unplanned - was very good. We can now see that collaboration via digital tools has increased massively and that colleagues are taking advantage of the opportunity to meet and exchange information virtually and to share their experiences. In this respect, the situation has perhaps also something positive that we will take with us into the future: It helps us to be open to new methods and to think and work in a more global and networked way - precisely because many of us are currently isolated.
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