BPiON expands its business and ensures data security for stakeholders with Azure solutions

Established in 2017 and with offices in Hungary, Poland, and Romania, BPiON aims to bring an innovative approach to business administration processes such as accounting, human resources management, and payroll processing. It offers smart technology solutions that help optimize its clients’ businesses across Europe. 

“As a young company, we have to compete with established legacy brands. But because we were born into the Azure cloud, we can be more agile due to the systems we run,” says Béla Kakuk, Chief Executive Officer at BPiON. “Azure is ISO27001 compliant, which is an international standard in managing information security that our clients expect from us, and which we need to have going forward,” he adds.

Supporting growth while maintaining security

As BPiON continued to expand and reach out to bigger clients, it faced a new challenge—scalability. “We needed to scale quickly because of our huge growth from zero to more than 200 people in just four years,” explains Tamás Kovács, Managing Director Hungary at BPiON. “We also needed to ensure we met the data security requirements of our bigger clients, as well as a country’s regulations on data management such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe. So, the right solution was essential in assuring our clients that no data would be lost or misused.”

Having worked well with Azure, BPiON wanted to explore more of Microsoft ecosystem. “Microsoft helped us from the early beginning and proposed a great partner, Gloster Cloud. Together, we planned and deployed all the solutions from end-to-end, starting from the wireframe to testing, and the final release,” details Rafał Nadolny, Managing Director Poland at BPiON. 

More flexibility, more control

BPiON decided to implement multiple Microsoft services to complete its infrastructure for scaling up. To empower administrators with remote control of computer applications and systems, the company deployed Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). “This now enables our team to fix or update software securely from a central system. The outsourced accountants and payroll clerks are also able to access applications in the cloud and work from any device, knowing that they can rely on Azure cloud security and connection. In fact, since we started with AVD, any connection-related incidents have decreased to 0.1 percent,” says Kovács. “Scaling is also at the click of a button—we can increase or decrease the number of AVD we need according to the number of users we have.”

Using AVD has also enabled BPiON to be more efficient. “Deployment and maintenance are now almost 10 times faster, as all applications can be installed and released through Azure Virtual Desktop. Server availability also went up to 99.9 percent,” says Nadolny. “It allowed us to progress faster. For example, expanding our operational infrastructure in two new countries—Poland and Romania—took us less than a day.”

To increase work flexibility, BPiON deployed Microsoft Intune. “With Microsoft Intune, our users can do business on multiple devices, and we can manage and update the software effortlessly. Also, we can easily locate a device as we can check at any time who was the last person using it,” says Kovács.

BPiON also decided to implement Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection for higher security. “It defends our systems with a set of policies triggered by multiple scenarios while continuously monitoring unusual and suspicious behavior,” explains Kovács. Furthermore, Azure Multi-Factor Authentication also requires users to authenticate their profiles with a password for multiple devices. “This ensures us that only authorized users have access to customer accounts that hold sensitive data,” adds Kovács.

A positive outlook

For BPiON, the project wasn’t just about taking up new technology, but also about transforming its work culture. “We gain people’s trust when they realize the system is working for them and not against them,” comments Nadolny.

Having seen such positive outcomes, BPiON wants to fine-tune its new infrastructure and improve security even further. “We are already looking into data classification and further data encryption for some current projects, considering to use several back-end settings as well as connections to fine-tune logging and reporting,” says Nadolny.

Moving forward, BPiON plans to continue its partnership with Microsoft. “Our data security savvy clients are familiar with Microsoft’s Cloud solutions —they know that it carries a sense of reliability for security. Having that assurance and scalability enables us to focus on and do our core job better, while leaving data protection in the hands of a solid system provider,” concludes Kakuk.