Headquartered in Delhi, India, HCL Technologies is a leading global technology services provider. It wanted to enhance an already mobile and agile corporate culture by boosting employees’ productivity, so it chose Microsoft 365. Today, employees work more efficiently to provide better customer service in highly secure mobile work environments, protected by access and data management policies that HCL created using Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security.
“Microsoft 365 is a complete, intelligent, and secure solution to empower employees to work more productively as they collaborate digitally across HCL.”
S. V. Ramana: Senior Vice President, IT
HCL Technologies
New business opportunities
HCL Technologies saw the potential of a digital workplace culture early. It deployed Microsoft Office 365 to all 120,000 employees in 39 countries to empower everyone to communicate and collaborate more efficiently. Based on its own experience, HCL helps customers re-imagine their business environments using modern tools and technologies. And because Office 365 is an evolving set of cloud solutions, HCL continues to enrich its own workplace, while passing along its new expertise to customers. For example, after HCL moved its entire business to Microsoft 365, which includes Windows 10 Enterprise, Microsoft Office 365, and Enterprise Mobility + Security, the company gained valuable expertise about harnessing the potential of anytime, anywhere digital workplaces—without compromising data security and privacy. That’s because HCL has deployed Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security cloud security tools to help secure corporate data.
“Microsoft 365 is a complete, intelligent, and secure solution to empower employees to work more productively as they collaborate digitally across HCL,” says S. V. Ramana, Senior Vice President, IT at HCL Technologies. “It unlocks creativity and gives more opportunity for teamwork along with intelligent security. Apart from this, the simplicity of Microsoft 365 is that all the workloads within it are tightly integrated, which makes the deployment quick and the journey towards a modern workplace faster. Security is paramount across all our product families. We are adopting an integrated, scalable identity-driven innovation to safeguard our crucial business data from evolving cybersecurity threats, and to guard our employees’ documents and applications, including third-party apps and tools, without compromising employees’ security and productivity. Employees benefit from a single unified identity to gain secure access to various productivity applications, supported line-of-business and third-party apps from almost any type of device. As the adoption of mobility increases, the risks of potential security threats and attacks will also simultaneously increase. Microsoft 365 is a one stop solution for a highly secure modern workspace of the future.”
“We turned to Enterprise Mobility + Security to improve data security and reduce operational costs,” adds Ashu Kakkar, Associate Vice President at HCL Technologies. “Today, we are fulfilling our employees’ expectations to work productively for our customers in highly secure mobile environments. As customers observe this latest step in our successful cloud journey, we gain new business opportunities by helping them benefit from our experience in securing a modern digital workplace culture.”
Mobile productivity with less risk
HCL considers approximately 80 percent of its workforce mobile. From executives to consultants to sales reps, everyone expects seamless access to their information on their own device. HCL reinforced its agile, productive workplace culture by replacing its mobile device management solution, AirWatch, with Microsoft Intune, the component of Enterprise Mobility + Security that manages mobile devices and apps.
HCL made the move because it wanted to support its employees’ preferences for a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) environment while also ensuring that corporate data would remain safe. The company solved this problem by using Intune to manage mobile applications for all 120,000 employees. This includes Office 365 apps and 30 corporate apps, such as corporate payroll, travel expense, and career management apps. HCL expects to extend Intune mobile application management to cover apps on an additional 80,000 laptops and desktops.
“With Intune, we freed ourselves from the device management scenario, a time-consuming task, considering our global footprint,” says Kakkar. “By focusing on managing the employee and their apps, not the device, we don’t have to worry about the scenario where an employee simply gets a new device and uses it for work, without IT knowing.”
That’s because HCL is taking advantage of the symbiotic combination of Intune and Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Premium, the multitenant, cloud-based directory and identity management service in Enterprise Mobility + Security. The company uses the mobile application management container capabilities in Intune. These capabilities rely on Azure AD identity management to isolate employees’ corporate data from their personal data so IT staff can apply corporate protection policies—safeguarding data and enhancing employee experience globally. For example, HCL has stipulated that employees can only copy corporate data within the parameters of their Office 365 apps. The solution has the capability to extend control to all non-Microsoft or line-of-business apps in a true enterprise deployment.
“Now, thanks to the app protection capability in Intune, employees maintain their personal email alongside their corporate email,” says Kakkar. “They can work with corporate data in any Office 365 app on the device of their choice. We also use this feature to selectively wipe corporate data from the device, should an employee lose it or leave the organization.”
HCL also used Azure Multi-Factor Authentication for all Office 365 apps and approximately 30 line-of-business apps for those occasions when employees use their mobile devices outside of the HCL network. “After some employees received malicious links in their corporate email, we locked down Exchange Online by stipulating that Outlook on the web is the only approved email on mobile devices, and it is also covered by multifactor authentication,” adds Kakkar.
Today, HCL employees have a simpler way to reset their passwords through self-service password management that comes with Azure AD. HCL deployed a solution where employees can unlock and reset their passwords through interactive voice response, thereby reducing help-desk calls by approximately 15 percent.
Safe sharing beyond corporate network
HCL is enriching partner and customer communications now that it can safely share documents containing sensitive content with organizations outside of the company, thanks to Azure Information Protection, also part of Enterprise Mobility + Security. All HCL employees can use the rights management capabilities within Azure Information Protection; however, several use cases stand out:
- Finance: Staffers use Azure Information Protection to safely share financial reports with the stock exchange and reduce the risk of financial reporting data leaking to the media.
- Sales: HCL employees can encrypt and protect all documentation pertaining to requests for proposals.
- Human resources: A few smaller HCL offices in remote areas outsource their payroll processing to third parties. Today, they safeguard that information using Azure Information Protection, rather than sending it via a file transfer protocol solution.
- Protect corporate data: All employees can encrypt information with Azure Information Protection to limit the access to anyone outside the organization.
Improved operational efficiencies while enhancing security
From identity-based mobile application management to conditional access policies and flexible digital rights management features, HCL achieves its multiple objectives of securing mobile workplace environments to drive employee productivity—without increasing the cost of operations. Cloud-based tools have replaced on-premises infrastructure associated with AirWatch and the company’s previous on-premises digital rights management solution. And with the simplified administration of integrated security capabilities in the Enterprise Mobility + Security environment, HCL IT staffers spend less time managing security and focus more on strategic work for the business.
“Usually, increasing security requires more time and labor,” concludes Kakkar. “Enterprise Mobility + Security delivers a double benefit—reinforcing our modern mobile workplace culture and reducing operational costs. Whenever we can support employees to work more efficiently, it’s good for our customers and it’s good for HCL.”
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