The Challenge

medac Group has a straightforward mission: improve human health, today and tomorrow. But in practice, that mission becomes more complicated because Germany-based medac operates in a highly regulated industry. The organization must balance strict compliance requirements with the need to enable its roughly 2,000 employees to efficiently and securely serve hospitals, physicians, and other customers in over 90 countries.

For Alexander Grimm, medac’s Head of IT Network, Cloud, Infrastructure, and Security, the focus has been on evolving the IT environment to better support modern ways of working. One issue: applications such as Microsoft 365 continue to update rapidly, a challenge for medac’s virtual desktop (VDI) system. Also, as suppliers of VDI and virtual private network (VPN) solutions boosted their prices, medac saw its infrastructure costs rise significantly.

Connecting users with a virtual desktop solution was also an issue. Disconnects, sometimes as many as five a day, could last for hours. Each time, over a thousand employees could not do their jobs. Further, because medac’s VDI setup involved multiple tools from multiple vendors, figuring out an issue’s cause was far from easy, leading to further delays.