Sofa so good

ish helps Nick Scali Furniture find a secure network solution.

Nick Scali Furniture was founded over 40 years ago and is now one of Australia’s largest retailers and importers of quality furniture, importing in excess of 1,000 containers of furniture per year, with 10 stores located in NSW, Queensland and the ACT.

Nicky Scali, Director of Nick Scali Furniture, approached ish to improve the security, speed & convenience of the transfer of information between the company’s head office and all stores.

At the time, store employees had to use a modem dial up connection from the store to head office. Data sharing between head office and the stores had the tendency to be slow and intermittent, and a secure connection was sought.

ish’s solution included the implementation of Astaro firewalls and DSL connections at all Nick Scali locations as well as the setting up of Astaro’s encrypted VPN tunnels from the head office to each store.

The head office staff can now remotely manage computers in stores and fix faults over the phone and with remote control software. Secure links have now also been established between ish and all stores, so that ish can remotely troubleshoot and repair problems on all computers at every location. This results in enormous savings, as ish no longer needs to do on-site repairs, and remote repair and troubleshooting work can be carried out quickly and economically.

All Nick Scali stores can now also securely access a central inventory and POS system in real time. This means there is no longer a need for nightly updates, and there is no chance of the system having out-of-date stock levels listed. This ability to have accurate, up-to-date inventory information is vital to the smooth running of the Nick Scali stores.

The Astaro solution also allows for detailed control and logging of store’s internet usage, web page views, and many other statistics, as well as the integration of stores into central office systems such as mail, file servers, printers, and all data storage.

At head office Astaro is also configured to scan all incoming and outgoing emails for viruses and spam. This has reduced the amount of spam which distracts staff from real work, and protects the entire network (including all the stores) from viruses. Having to maintain virus scanning software and definition updates on each computer in their business was difficult, particularly with stores in three states. Now Astaro automatically updates virus definitions hourly in one central place.

Even without specialised security knowledge, Nicky Scali finds it easy to update rules and security settings at any store without leaving his desk. Because Astaro has a simple to use interface, these administration tasks don’t have to wait for a security specialist.

“Ari Maniatis and the team at ish were fantastic. They were able to provide me with a solution that has made my business more efficient, has saved my staff time, and has also saved us a lot of money. Without Astaro, this solution would not have been possible.”

Nicky Scali, Nick Scali Furniture