For greater than 60 years, MacDonald-Miller Facility Options has been shaping the Pacific Northwest skyline—designing, constructing and optimizing mechanical techniques that make buildings work higher. However behind the scenes, their IT workforce confronted a problem as advanced as any building blueprint: the way to preserve a rising, distributed workforce related and safe with out slowing down the enterprise.
“We’re not simply sitting in places of work,” mentioned Seth Henderson, Director of IT. “Our individuals are all over the place—at job websites, on buyer networks and even of their vehicles. We wanted know-how that works wherever they work.”
A connectivity problem: Distributed workforce, rising danger
When Henderson joined MacDonald-Miller 20 years in the past, the IT workforce was simply 5 individuals. Right now, it’s practically 30 sturdy—however their mission hasn’t wavered: be a know-how accomplice to the enterprise.
That mission turned more durable to satisfy as the corporate expanded and embraced cloud providers. Staff had been transferring between networks consistently, and MacDonald-Millers’ previous VPN resolution couldn’t sustain.
“Somebody would undock their laptop computer, change to wi-fi and all of the sudden lose entry,” Henderson recalled. “They’d must reboot simply to reconnect. It was irritating—and it slowed individuals down.”
The turning level got here throughout a go to to a buyer website. Whereas connecting to their community, MacDonald-Miller’s laptops detected malicious exercise concentrating on their units. This expertise highlighted a important fact: safety should accompany the consumer. It accelerated their transfer to Zero Belief, making certain safety wherever work occurs.
“We noticed how rapidly issues may escalate,” mentioned Aaron Unger, Cloud System Administrator. “That was the second we knew we wanted zero belief.”
Zero belief bolsters operational agility
To modernize connectivity and cut back danger, MacDonald-Miller partnered with Lumen to deploy a Zero Belief Community Entry (ZTNA) resolution—and the optimistic outcomes had been instant.
“The onboarding was the smoothest I’ve ever seen,” Unger mentioned. “Inside hours, we had a working resolution. By the top of the primary day, the configuration was principally performed.”
The ZTNA resolution gave the IT workforce real-time visibility into connections, granular entry controls and the power to implement safety insurance policies with out sacrificing usability.
“One of many greatest wins was flexibility,” Henderson defined. “If somebody must step into a distinct function, we will regulate their entry in minutes. That’s big for an organization like ours.”
Efficiency that drives actual impression
The advantages weren’t simply technical—they enhanced how workers work daily. Distant engineers who as soon as struggled to obtain giant architectural recordsdata noticed efficiency enhance as much as thrice.
“We had one consumer who couldn’t get into the workplace,” Unger shared. “After switching to the brand new resolution, he mentioned it was night time and day. His productiveness skyrocketed.”
The rollout was so easy that Henderson calls it the corporate’s most impactful IT change of the yr. “Each single individual in our know-how advisory group mentioned the identical factor,” he famous. “This resolution modified how we work.”
Future-ready IT for a multi-cloud world
With zero belief in place, MacDonald-Miller is now prioritizing resilience and multi-cloud methods to mitigate dangers from outages and assist guarantee uninterrupted service.
“Our objective is to verify we’re at all times accessible for our clients,” Henderson mentioned. “This resolution is a foundational piece of that technique.”
For an organization that prides itself on making buildings work higher, the partnership with Lumen allows their very own infrastructure to be simply as sturdy—safe, scalable and prepared for no matter comes subsequent.
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