Footy team scales-up security

Rugby League fans, regardless of affiliation, tend to revere the Wests Tigers football club for its history. The product of a merger in 2000 of two of Sydney’s oldest Rugby League teams – the Balmain Tigers and the Western Suburbs Magpies – the club’s IT requirements have evolved in recent years, leading management to seek the assistance of a reseller to optimise security of its network.

Based at Concord Oval in Sydney’s inner west, the club has 35 full time employees in administration and marketing in addition to players, coaching and support staff. When the decision was made to overhaul the IT security infrastructure, Wests Tigers recruited Partner IT – a Sydney and Illawarra region IT services firm – to deliver a messaging security solution to protect the network from traditional threats such as viruses, spam and spyware, as well as emerging threats such as rootkits and bots.

On the recommendation of Partner IT, Wests Tigers upgraded from an existing Symantec solution to Trend Micro Client Server Messaging Security for SMB (CSM for SMB), a single, all-in-one multi-layer solution. According to Partner IT, the security application is designed to protect all system files and data on the network, including company wide documents, spreadsheets and accounting system.

“We decided to migrate to Trend Micro on the recommendation from Partner IT. After their initial audit we were concerned by their findings that only 60 percent of our machines were protected and the majority were out of date on definitions,” said Kirsty Halfnights, account executive at West Tigers Rugby League Football Club.

“By allowing Partner IT to take ownership of our site via a managed services partnership it allowed for regular reporting and monitoring to ensure that we are safe and all of our machines were being monitored.”

According to Halfnights, Partner IT was recommended by a Wests Tigers staff member. She added that the club was pleased to find an IT company that takes ownership of customer sites, regardless of whether they have supplied the network equipment or not.

“This ensures that we can focus on our business and not IT to complete our work in an efficient manner,” she said.

Its relationship with IT brands including Trend Micro, Partner IT focuses on providing start-to-finish IT solutions for local SMBs. Following an initial audit of the Wests Tigers network, the reseller discovered an “unmanaged” installation of an antivirus application and only 60 percent of computers had the program actively installed.