IT Gets Dressed Up

Although a midsize business, manufacturing the Josephine Chaus line of its women&'s wear is a global project. Headquartered in New York, Bernard Chaus&' 300 employees are scattered worldwide in locations such as Hong Kong, Seoul and Guatemala City. Employees also work remotely, moving goods and designs back and forth from New York to Asia and South America.

For Chaus&' CIO, Ed Eskew, the company&'s growing server population and securing its network and legacy applications were top priorities. The company was spending $150,000 each year on its frame-relay network, and local networks were not linked. And with no company e-mail, Chaus was spending over $90,000 annually on postage.

Eskew brought in security and networking solution provider CGAtlantic, Roslyn, N.Y., to revamp its server environment and beef up security.

“Because of its Asian locations and South American facilities, Chaus has really become a 24x7 organization. End users are accessing [the] network at all hours. These security solutions can&'t fail,” said Yuval Goren, CTO at CGAtlantic.

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“Clearly, the state of the Internet today is that cybercrime is rampant. It&'s gone from kids on the Internet having fun running scripts to an organized, profiteering business,” Goren said. “There&'s motivation there for people to attack networks and get to data.”

CGAtlantic created a layered security network by incorporating endpoint, perimeter and internal security, and providing security and network management for the midmarket fashion house.

To protect Chaus&' data, CGAtlantic deployed what it calls “security in a box.” The solution comprises an IBM BladeCenter running BladeFusion SPE management software on six blade servers, allowing for failover should any server go down. Check Point Software&'s VPN-1 Pro NGX, Connectra and Integrity security software and Open Service STM threat management software also were integrated, giving the apparel maker a secure, reliable network for its international communication needs. “As we were starting to deploy these solutions, the challenge became managing it all and how do we make it highly available,” Goren said. Building the system with a single hardware management platform allowed for high availability and central control.

Chaus effectively outsourced managing its security and network infrastructure to CGAtlantic, and the solution provider is now testing Microsoft Exchange on the system, as well as Gerber product data management and Accumark pattern design software, both of which are business-critical applications for the fashion house.

The system also gives Chaus room to grow as it allows for additional blade servers to be added easily to the network. “I&'m very excited about furthering the concept of creating an entirely separate blade server [that is] linked to active blade servers with applications running on it. Now we are able to immediately create a disaster recovery or business continuity solution,” Eskew said.

However, cost was a major concern for a midmarket company such as Chaus.

“What are C-level executives in the midmarket really concerned with? Two things: Security and the unknown,” said Robert Cohen, president of CGAtlantic. “How do you know you&'re really secure? How do you know you&'re going to be prepared to embrace the next security requirement, whether it&'s an answer to regulatory compliance or just a solution to the next bad thing?”

“Cost is always extremely important,” Eskew said. “We don&'t live on the same types of margins as some industries. We&'re dealing with entirely different kinds of cash flows.”

Because margins in the fashion industry generally hover around 2 percent, the apparel shop has little wiggle room for costly IT systems that wouldn&'t fit its needs, Eskew said. However, it fell on Eskew to pitch the project to his managers and show that the improvements would be worth the investment.

“I&'m not a toys guy,” Eskew said. “They know when I go to them, I go to them for something important [and] they listen. But they do that because I haven&'t gone back for the toys. I&'ve gone back for very strategic capital when I thought it was appropriate. That was the impetus for the blade servers and security in a box.”