Smh:
A “NIGHTMARE”. At least that’s how Capt’n Snooze’s IT manager saw things. The bedding franchisees are in the business of sweet dreams, but what Lionel van Niekerk saw in the 73 stores under his purview was worth plenty of sleepless nights.
The 11-year-old network that underpinned the business was prehistoric. More than half the stores connected their Pronto enterprise management software to headquarters over a serial link: the predecessor to modern TCP/IP internet standards.
It was slow and unreliable and often broke down. “We were getting up to 55 support calls a day,” Mr van Niekerk says.
There were constant drop-outs, he says, and rebooting the system took up to 20 minutes at a time. Transactions wouldn’t go through, inventory couldn’t be checked. Even when it worked, business data transfer to the central ledgers took hours.
Each store had built its own IT infrastructure over many years. Hardware was out of date and nothing was standardised.
Security was terrifyingly lax. Anti-virus software was never up to date. When stores dialled up to Capt’n Snooze over a VPN to check emails or read documentation, they opened the central office to whatever nasties they had collected.
“When we started cleaning up we found 4500 viruses,” Mr van Niekerk says.The network’s many faults also frustrated progress in other areas. Franchisees looking at technology such as touch screens and process automation discovered it couldn’t sit on top of their infrastructure.
The solution was nothing less than a complete overhaul of the core system.
Pacific Internet, with its channel partner Techlink, put together a $500,000, three-year project to transform the company’s IT infrastructure. A fully maintained private network will run between head office and the stores, updating all enterprise management data in real time. Headquarters has a fibre connection to the internet and the franchisees will be on business-grade 512 Kb DSL broadband.
Each store will have a Cisco router using Pacific’s SecureSite service, in which all maintenance and updates are managed remotely and an SLA guarantees 99.9 per cent uptime.
A Trend Micro security suite with 24/7 service was installed at central office, with a client in every store that updates regularly via headquarters.
“We wanted to take away the IT hardships,” Mr van Niekerk says. “SecureSite is a marvellous idea, it’s good having in the back of your mind that your network is constantly monitored and secure.
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