Case Study: Beiersdorf Shared Services halves IT costs and enables seamless remote work with Microsoft Azure Windows Virtual Desktop

Beiersdorf Shared Services cuts IT costs in half with Windows Virtual Desktop

Beiersdorf Shared Services, the IT arm supporting the global Beiersdorf Group (brands like Nivea and tesa), faced growing strain from its remote-access setup: about 20,500 users relied on VPNs while the IT team had to maintain parallel virtual clients and terminal servers, driving up hardware, maintenance and licensing effort and delivering uneven performance. With the need to avoid large datacenter investments and minimize disruption for users, the team sought a cloud-based alternative.

Working with Microsoft and partner Sepago, BSS deployed Windows Virtual Desktop on Azure—rapidly moving from pilot to global roll-out as the pandemic hit. The solution delivered full virtual workstations accessible from any device, fast standardized provisioning, autoscaling and centralized monitoring. The result: seamless remote onboarding and consistent user experience worldwide, a roughly 50% reduction in IT hardware, energy, maintenance and license costs, and significantly lower administration overhead.

Beiersdorf

Sebastian Meyer

Global Service Owner for Modern Client Technologies