KWS: Global plant business reroots its IT infrastructure effortlessly in the cloud

125 hours

saved per month on onboarding tasks

187 integrated applications

ready for use in the cloud and on-premises

4,500 internal employees worldwide

using Single Sign-On and Multi-Factor Authentication

  • A down-to-earth cloud journey
  • Picking the right tools
  • Security made easy
  • From little seeds grow big trees
  • Laying the groundwork for more innovation
A down-to-earth cloud journey

Since its founding in 1856, plant breeding company KWS has thrived on innovation. KWS uses leading-edge plant breeding methods to increase farmers’ yields and improve resistance to disease, pests, and abiotic stress. To support its global workforce to be equally successful in their daily work, the company adopted a cloud infrastructure with Microsoft Azure to enable employees to access digital tools from wherever they are, be it the office, laboratories, or on the field.

Picking the right tools

Before rolling out its new cloud-based work tools globally, such as Office 365, the KWS team responsible for implementing the company’s IT guidelines from the headquarters in Germany needed a way to efficiently manage the 4,500 internal user and 1,000 external identities that were about to be onboarded to the new system from across 120 locations worldwide. With partner Beck et al., KWS landed on the Okta Identity Cloud as its identity management solution of choice to enable employees to access their new tools securely and hassle-free no matter