ish helps CUE stay one step ahead. Security never goes out of fashion.

With a chain of over 100 stores across Australia and New Zealand, CUE Clothing Co. has established itself as one of the leading modern clothing stores. Since the 1960s, CUE has defined women’s fashion, particularly for the chic business executive. CUE has always enjoyed a high profile and with models such as Claudia Schiffer shooting their advertising campaigns, CUE is frequently in the spotlight.

Secure and reliable IT infrastructure is important when managing a large range of stores, and when dealing with the department stores and other retailers who demand fast and efficient service. Rob Wils, CUE’s IT manager, chose Astaro to protect CUE’s main offices and warehouses.

Astaro is used to allow IT staff and management secure 24 hour remote access to crucial information via PPTP. IT staff can diagnose and fix problems without being onsite. In addition, outside consultants can be given temporary access to a particular server by simply switching on their user access rights in the Web Admin.

Astaro’s web proxy saves bandwidth and makes internet access faster, and because Astaro is built on open source Linux systems, it was easy for Rob to modify the web proxy configuration to allow some staff access to the web during lunch and after business hours. This is a good compromise, allowing staff to continue to use the fast internet for personal Hotmail and other services without putting excessive load on the internet connection during crucial business times. Other staff who need constant web access are given different access rules.

By caching all web access, Rob has found that updating Windows workstations to the latest service patch or desktop virus definition file is extremely fast. After the first download, all other machines get their updates quickly from the Astaro cache.

Viruses and spam are stopped by the thousands each day, using Astaro mail filtering options. This is a crucial aspect to reducing the amount of time wasted by useless or dangerous email. Further, Astaro protects the crucial mail servers on which so much of CUE’s daily business relies. With CUE’s important business partners in Astaro’s whitelist, no crucial legitimate email is stopped by the filter, even if it looks like spam.

“The Astaro solution has it all. Firstly, it was easy to deploy: I installed all the applications in one simple process. The unified reporting system, with its complete set of logs and reports, makes my job easier. I also love the Up2Date service, which is automated and so simple to use. It’s a winning package all around!”

Rob Wills, CUE Clothing Co.