Packaging is essential to the supply of critical consumer goods, during the COVID-19 outbreak. From perishable foods and hand sanitizers to pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, an efficient packaging supply chain has to ensure uninterrupted delivery of packaged goods from factories to retailers and into people’s homes.

Amcor, a global packaging leader has remained operational in more than 40 countries, and has adapted to have many of its back-office employees work from home. By rapidly rolling out teleworking policies worldwide, Amcor has continued to support its customers and made sure people around the world can get the products they need.

Adapting to a global crisis

As the outbreak spread in China, Amcor asked Orange Business to increase capacity on its existing remote SSL access service. Orange initially increased the licenses for 100 concurrent users to start working remotely over the Chinese New Year. However, it was soon obvious that many more workers in China would need to work from home to guarantee their safety. To rapidly increase Amcor’s remote user access capacity, Orange added functionality to the existing firewalls in the company’s data center. They are provided as a managed service by Orange. This was much quicker than deploying an additional SSL remote access gateway.

As the Coronavirus spread to other parts of the world, Amcor knew it needed to dramatically increase its remote working capacity. This would allow it to keep critical packaging supplies moving during the pandemic.



As the Coronavirus spread to other parts of the world, Amcor knew it needed to dramatically increase its remote working capacity.


 

Being able to scale up its remote working capabilities required a huge effort by Orange and Amcor’s own in-house IT team. Both entities worked around the clock to provide a seamless transition to teleworking that ensured minimal disruption to customers. Orange upgraded Amcor’s data centers in North America, Europe and Singapore to increase the company’s bandwidth into them. Each of these regions provide remote access services via Mobile SSL and the Orange Flexible SSL cloud solution.

However, Flexible SSL was only able to support up to 2,000 concurrent users per region. This would not satisfy all home working demands as the Coronavirus spread. Orange rapidly replicated the same method it had used in the company’s China operations, using the firewalls in the data centers to rapidly scale up remote access. This took Amcor from a few hundred remote users prior to the pandemic to several thousand concurrent users in each region.

Orange also increased the MPLS network bandwidth in Amcor’s regional gateway in the US for users in the Americas and in Asia in a timely manner. This was designed to provide users with the performance they would need for all their business applications including Microsoft Office 365 and Orange’s telephony and video services.

Optimizing operations

As the pandemic has spread worldwide, Orange has helped Amcor seamlessly switch many employees to home working and maintain the supply of packaging worldwide. Orange is continuing to work with Amcor to make network upgrades as required to deal with the pressure packaging distribution is under during COVID-19 crisis.