As of November 2008, Kauffman Tire has 50 retail stores, 11 wholesale distribution centers, 4 commercial tire centers, 1 Bandag retreading facility, and the e-commerce site Treadepot.com. Kauffman Tire offers daily delivery to customers out of all 11 wholesale centers, with a fleet of approximately 100 vehicles.
The Challenge
“Our biggest concern was reducing the amount of spam in our associates' inboxes,” explained Aldredge. The company also needed a system that would offer a simple implementation and would be easy to use on the back end. Aldredge continued: “It was important that whatever system we implemented wasn't too complicated to administer as we do not have a large IT department.” With three separate websites, Kauffman Tire needed a product with robust security capabilities, and that could scale as the company needed additional features.
The Requirements
Aldredge estimates that the Astaro Security Gateway blocks approximately 5,000 to 7,000 unwanted spam emails a day protecting over 500 devices and users. While associates at Kauffman Tire are happy the company solved the spam problem, the IT department was even more pleased with the product. "We saw that there was so much more to this product and it has proven to be a great tool for our IT staff and huge benefit to our associates," said Aldredge. The appliance offered Kauffman Tire robust firewall protection, content filtering and a VPN solution, solving the company's security issues with one appliance.
The Solution
Aldredge considered implementing several other solutions but during the research and assessment process he easily determined that the Astaro Security Gateway was more affordable, would be easier to implement and had all the capabilities the company required. Kauffman Tire decided to implement the Astaro Security Gateway 320 to combat spam on their network. Aldredge was pleased with the easy set up and due to the inherent modularity of the Astaro solution he knew he could add additional features as they were needed over time. After the initial ease of setting up the spam filter, Kauffman Tire began using the Astaro Security Gateway as their main firewall, to set up VPN access for remote workers, as a proxy server and for content filtering.
Success with Astaro
Kauffman Tire was operating without a spam filter, causing their associates’ inboxes to be flooded with spam. Sifting through all the unwanted email was taking time away from their primary duty of servicing customers. The Astaro Security Gateway is now blocking 5,000 - 7,000 spam messages a day, freeing up countless hours of associates time.
