Everton picks system with a tight defence

Premiership football club Everton has installed new IT security systems allowing it to roll out future business initiatives much faster.

The club, which aims to boost income by securing a £12.8m cash investment from investment consortium Fortress Sports Fund, is installing a technology infrastructure to allow the IT department to react swiftly to potential joint ventures and other revenue-generating plans.

By implementing access rights and internet-screening technologies from security firm Websense, Everton's six-strong IT team can spend more time developing new business systems for the club.

'We have plans to introduce IP telephony, wireless, smartcard ticketing and access control in the future,' says Steve Etheridge, head of IT at Everton FC. 'We also have plans for a larger Siebel CRM rollout.

'But if we don't have a system such as Websense in place then we will keep getting side-tracked on fixing infected systems rather than innovating.'

Following a large increase in trojans, viruses and other malicious code attacking the club's PCs, Etheridge's team had to spend increasing amounts of time reconfiguring and cleaning machines.

But by installing Websense's Client Policy Manager, the club is now able to prevent spyware and other potentially damaging applications that have sneaked onto devices from infecting business-critical systems.

The software allocates access rights to each Everton employee, governing what they can and cannot do on the internet.

'We had to keep being reactive and respond to these problems, which would cost us time when cleaning up the machines,' says Etheridge. 'But we needed to keep the support in IT as low as possible, because we have so much on the go at the moment with other technology initiatives.'

Everton's 280 permanent staff are becoming ever more reliant on networked and internet-based business applications, so heightened security is crucial to prevent downtime and hacking.

'Our challenge, being a football club, is that we are high-profile and a target for a number of things,' says Etheridge.

'The scope of the network is quite extensive and complex to manage, and internet access is crucial to a large number of employees at the club.

'We have big accounting systems running on Great Plains, retail and ticketing systems, reservations tools, and we even use the network in the restaurant.'

The internet is also used heavily at Everton's study centre, a joint initiative by the club, the Department for Education and Skills, and the Local Education Authority, allowing schoolchildren to study at the ground as part of their curriculum. To make sure children can't access inappropriate web sites, the club has also installed a web-filtering tool.

Remote working is on the increase at the club, allowing staff to work more effectively at the training ground or when the team is playing away on match days.

Everton uses Citrix thin-client applications, so business tools can be accessed from outside the local area network, while RSA SecureID software is used on each remote laptop to authenticate club staff.

'We have people accessing email accounts, and staff who need to communicate with employees back at our home ground Goodison Park on match day,' says Etheridge.

'Our press and communications team needs to remotely upload and download a variety of files onto our web site when we are playing away from home. Our chief executive will access his email, and then there are employees in the IT department maintaining a number of applications and offering support remotely.'

Scouts and youth academy staff are also frequently on the road looking for new talent and assessing current players. They can now upload data into the academy's database.

'The reason we're extending our support in IT is because we need an infrastructure to deal with all the initiatives that we are undertaking,' says Etheridge.

'We could have new joint ventures and other commercial activities, and we want to be ready to tackle these.'