Jon StatonTechnical Services ManagerStaffordshirehttp://www.wedgwood.co.uk/
Wedgwood was formed in 1759 by Josiah Wedgwood, a man who dreamed of creating the world's greatest ceramics and developing a true English style able to transcend global fashion boundaries. Within ten years he had transformed the nation's tableware and his inspiration has remained key to Wedgwood's success ever since. Today the Wedgwood brand is the world's leading luxury lifestyle company with a fascinating history and a diverse base of followers, including kings, queens and world leaders in more than 100 countries around the globe. In 1940, the Staffordshire potteries moved its factory and base of operations to a countryside location in Barlaston where it remains to this day. Their 500 acre site comprises a visitor centre, shop, restaurant and museum, which this year won the prestigious art fund prize and was officially named as Britain's best museum. The global Wedgwood group presently employs over 2000 employees worldwide with sites in Ireland, the US, Indonesia, Australia and Japan. Network and technical services at the company's UK headquarters are looked after by a team of 12 IT staff, and are overseen by Technical Services Manager, Jon Staton
Wedgwood has 400 users in a predominantly Windows environment. Guardian is running on 2xHP Servers running VMWare ESX3.5
Wedgwood needed better web security and improved visibility over their employees' Internet use. A key requirement was more accurate blocking since the group's existing solution was not sufficiently blocking undesirable content and adverts, could not deliver the granular level of reporting required and was proving difficult and time-consuming for the team to manage. Jon was looking for a flexible, easy to manage solution that offered better reporting and good value for money to match the Group's budgetary constraints in the present financial climate.
Jon trialled both Bloxx and Guardian and quickly realized that Smoothwall offered more of the features he was looking for and came at a significantly cheaper price, partly because it was a software-based solution. Jon also liked the AV scanning, built-in support for Instant Messaging (Wedgwood is presently trialing the use of MSN to aid their global communications) the SSL filtering features and the flexibility to implement time-based policies, so filtering could be relaxed outside of core working hours.
In comparison with their previous solution, Jon says Guardian is a significant leap forward, helping their department to become more resource efficient, preserving bandwidth and saving valuable time for the IT team. Jon is also particularly pleased with the level of service he has received from Smoothwall and is now keen to roll the solution out to the Group's other worldwide sites.
Guardian is powerful, efficient and represents great value for money. We have absolutely no hesitation in recommending this solution for deployment throughout the global Wedgwood group
Guardian was really easy to install, we were up and running in minutes with no major niggles. The ability to use a virtual platform was a key advantage for us, since it allows us to use and deploy our existing hardware more efficiently
Guardian is much easier to manage and far more accurate than our previous solution, which often blocked false positives and even inadvertently blocked our own website! Guardian's reporting is also a thousand times better
Guardian seems to be very efficient in terms of page processing speeds and our bandwidth usage has improved significantly. Since installing the new solution, we have noticed we now spend much less time on admin as we can generate detailed reports quickly without needing to trawl through logs
Sales and Tech Support have been brilliant and the software is powerful, efficient and represents great value for money. We have absolutely no hesitation in recommending this solution for deployment throughout the global Wedgwood group
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