How Arup eliminated 95 data centers and reduced their mean time to resolution

Introduction

Arup is a global engineering and sustainable development consultancy that provides design, engineering, architecture, planning, and advisory services across every aspect of the built environment. Operating in 140 countries, Arup is dedicated to sustainable development and founded on principles of both humanity and excellence.

Arup has been a TeamViewer customer since 2008. In that time, they've decommissioned 95 physical servers, extended the lifecycle of 20,000+ machines, and scaled to 5,000+ monthly IT instructions — all without disrupting a single employee. Here's how.

Challenges

Managing physical data centers across 95 global offices was costly and increasingly at odds with Arup's cloud-first ambitions. But eliminating them without disrupting 18,000 hybrid employees wasn't straightforward. Arup needed a way to decommission that infrastructure cleanly, without operational impact.

Device compliance added another layer of complexity. With a hybrid workforce operating on thousands of endpoints, keeping every device patched, secure, and up to date was a manual undertaking that wasn't scaling. At the same time, every unmanaged device was a potential risk.

Meanwhile, Arup's approach to device refresh was costing more than it should. Replacing machines on a fixed 3–4 year cycle meant that sometimes fully functional devices were retired unnecessarily, while devices that needed attention went unnoticed. Without real performance data, it was impossible to make the right call.

And with 18,000 employees generating a flow of IT tickets, service desk operations were under pressure. Manually resolving digital disruptions at that scale was pulling the IT team away from higher-value work and creating friction for employees in the process.  

Solution

Arup chose to implement TeamViewer DEX to help it replace its 95 servers with a cloud-based distribution model that uses only available bandwidth. Meaning no local infrastructure required. The result was a clean transition to cloud-first, with no disruption to employees across any of their global offices.

Additionally, TeamViewer DEX Endpoint Automation gave Arup's the ability to deploy compliance instructions to any device, anywhere. Regardless of whether employees were on-site, remote, or hybrid. So, what had been a slow, manual process became automated and invisible to end users. Thus, improving the experience for employees while strengthening security across their entire environment.

Using TeamViewer, Arup had access to performance data for each of their devices. This allowed them to analyze memory usage, CPU performance, disk throughput, and crash patterns across 20,000+ machines.

Using this information, Arup can now make informed refresh decisions and this, in turn, extended their device lifecycles and allows them to only replace hardware when needed. And catch issues before employees even notice them.

The same data supports their sustainability program, helping Arup manage responsible device disposal and benefit from carbon credits.

In addition, TeamViewer’s DEX ServiceNow integration changed how Arup's service desk operates. IT teams can now investigate and remediate issues directly within ServiceNow. No context switching, no separate tooling.

The impact was immediate: Arup went from issuing a few hundred instructions per month to over 5,000. This led to a drop in their Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and IT admins to gain time and capacity to focus on more pressing issues.