Securing the Network

Summer Hill

Industry: Home Furnishings and Fabrics
Network Size: 12 users

“It’s nice to know the capability for easy expansion is there."

Background
Summer Hill, Ltd. is a relatively small business with a global reach. Headquartered in the San Francisco bay area, it sells high quality furniture and fabrics to architects and interior designers all over the world.

Craig Brown runs Summer Hill’s IT operation. Like a lot of network staff in small to medium businesses, he does not have an extensive background in IT: rather, the role has fallen on him as the company has grown.

Craig protects the Summer Hill network with Untangle. Although it’s not a particularly complex operation, Summer Hill’s servers host a database and applications that are vital to the smooth running of the company’s international operations. The central network is also accessed remotely by Summer Hill Showrooms. Before the Untangle system was implemented a couple of years ago, the network was, he says, “wide open.”

Security Challenges
“We had a number of incidents, mostly security-based, which we just had no effective defenses against,” he says. “I remember cases where the whole network would slow down because a bad guy cracked the security and hijacked a workstation to send out spam.”

Untangle has made a big difference to this. On the rare occasion there is a problem, the system can help track it down right away. “We had an incident about a year back when the network went slow again. We called Untangle, and using their system they very quickly traced the problem back to a single laptop—it turned out that an employee had downloaded an infected application.”

Peace of Mind
Craig likes Untangle because the combination of technology and expert back-up means that he doesn’t have to get too deeply involved in solving problems, and he’s rarely presented with crises that are above his technical abilities. “We use Untangle as a firewall, a spam filter, a spyware detector, an antivirus—everything, really. These days we have peace of mind knowing that we are protected. In the past when we had a problem it took a lot of our time to resolve.”

Right now, Craig is aware that Summer Hill isn’t using Untangle’s latest applications. In the future, he says, the firm may consider such services as the web-enabled Remote Access Portal for remote access. “For now it’s good to know that security is something we don’t have to think about—but it’s nice to know the capability for easy expansion is there.”