Rema Tip Top studies tablets following security upgrade

Automotive and industrial products company Rema Tip Top Australia has begun the process of a tablet review following the implementation of a new firewall system.

IT manager, Yoon Chong, said that prior to working with security vendor, WatchGuard, the company had nine sites around Australia operating nine separate firewall systems.

“As part of the implementation exercise we linked everything together using this private network,” he said. “Now we have an internet gateway with a WatchGuard firewall serving all of Australia and protecting all the sites.”

With regards to tablets, Chong said the company has been evaluating various models, including the iPad, because they would tie in strongly with the company’s business applications.

“We have truck drivers travelling around the country and doing point of sale on their laptops,” he said. “We might introduce handheld tablets to the field so we can get fresh data in a timely fashion from the field.”

Chong said the company will choose the tablet which worked best with its business functions. It has considered ruggedised Lenovo tablets in the past given that many of its workers are out in the field and at mining sites.

Chong said that one of the reasons Rema Tip Top decided to work with WatchGuard was that the company had been receiving a number of spam emails and there had been attempted attacks on its infrastructure.

“Recently we upgraded our old firewall with redundancy, so now we are progressing to the third step early next year where we will offer total [security] protection and redundancy on both data centres," he said.

"Right now all of our internet feed comes from one data centre in NSW which is linked to TPG’s corporate division." Following the firewall implementation, the company is doing a mail server refresh from mail server 2003 to 2010.

Rema Tip Top's Australian operations cover all of Asia Pacific including Japan, China and the Philippines. According to Chong, the company is one of the largest tyre repairers in the country and provides patches and tools to companies such as Dunlop and Kmart.

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