The robot whisperers: KUKA develops automation solutions in the cloud

The challenge: Static structures and the VPN divide between North and South America 

You’ll find them wherever anything is being welded, assembled, painted, measured, picked, palleted, or stacked: industrial robots. With automation on the rise worldwide, machines are driving production in numerous sectors. KUKA robots can be found in the factories of the best-known manufacturing companies around the globe. Thereby, KUKA IT is organized in an “empowered region model”, with the company’s IT department managing countries and their markets independently to ensure optimum responsiveness to regional requirements. 

“Each order, each customer, and each project is different,” explains Michael Fera, Vice President IT (Americas) at KUKA. “What that means for us in the IT department is that we can’t plan according to repetitive processes coordinated centrally – we have to remain flexible and agile.” In the past, Fera’s department managed all the applications and software solutions KUKA developed in-house for North and South America within an on-premises landscape, which tied up a great deal of energy and resources. What was lacking was the level of flexibility needed to manage operations across two continents. “We’re an engineering company that continuously enhances its products and services,” Fera says. “As a result, new applications are appearing and new users are being added all the time. Our old on-premises infrastructure wasn’t scalable enough to keep pace with these changes.” Coordinating applications centrally while using them in both North and South America led to high latencies in the different regions. Connected via VPN, the locations in South America often had a hard time accessing process-critical applications quickly enough. 

KUKA set out to find ways to free up its IT department and to focus on innovation and improving application availability. What was needed was increased flexibility in operating its own applications, more straightforward access to data, higher scalability, and more rapid availability. The company found what it was looking for in Microsoft Azure. 

The solution: Increasing speed, security, and scalability by moving as much as possible to the cloud

Four years ago, Fera decided that he no longer wanted the company to invest in on-premises structures: “Since 2018, we’ve carefully examined what data really ought to be hosted in our data center. Everything else can move to the cloud.” All applications programmed in-house by KUKA in the Americas have now been migrated to Microsoft Azure, where they are operated using Azure App Service. The vast amounts of product data are currently still stored on-premises. This new, hybrid infrastructure has really made life easier for Fera and the KUKA IT department: “Every day at work I see how much our operational processes have speeded up. We’re no longer dependent on VPN connections—now we can design and use applications and services faster and, most importantly, in a more mobile way. Everything we do requires being online.”

In addition to enhanced flexibility, scalability, and agility, Microsoft’s solutions also impress with their high security standards and straightforward administration. These are key factors because KUKA places great importance on security when using and managing its data. This has also made life much easier for the DevOps teams: authentication used to be managed manually, with permissions assigned user by user. This cost a great deal of time and effort and had to be repeated anytime an employee changed roles. Now, permissions are allocated across various roles, thus solving the problem. 

Microsoft Teams is also now an integral part of life at KUKA. Before the COVID-19 health crisis, the collaboration tool was used only internally by the IT department; now the whole company uses it. Teams makes working from home efficient, bringing together colleagues located all over the world. It also provides a direct link to the IT department: support requests are processed and resolved on Teams instead of using TeamViewer as before. With Microsoft Teams, everything is in one place, which also lightens the load for the IT department.

Fera is currently planning to implement even more Microsoft solutions, including Azure Sentinel as a state-of-the-art solution for KUKA’s security information and event management (SIEM) activities. Azure Sentinel could augment security solutions already in place, such as Defender, and thus ensure KUKA’s applications are secure at all times.

In addition to all the security aspects, Fera also has an eye on the company’s digital future. “In the Americas, we can now contemplate entirely new solutions that for budgetary reasons would have been nearly impossible to adopt. This progress is due to the scalability of the cloud,” he explains. “We’re constantly thinking about what happens to our data and are able to precisely map how this will affect our investment in storage. This gives us maximum financial planning certainty.” 

KUKA’s IT department can now focus on its main job: providing innovative solutions for the future of industrial robotics.