Case study: Bolton Wanderers FC

Bolton Wanderers Football Club has tightened network security and taken pressure off its datacentre by moving web security into the cloud.

The club switched from having on-site hardware for its web security, which it found time-consuming to maintain and update, to using so-called security-as-a-service from ScanSafe.

“We moved our email security to the cloud model when we chose Mimecast and wanted to do the same with web security, and take costs and management out of the datacentre. Hardware has a single point of failure and if there are power outages, there are procedural issues about getting back up and running, which we were happy to relinquish,” says Dave Atkinson, IT director at the Premier League club.

However, the club’s core system is its electronic point of sale (Epos) system for tickets and Atkinson plans to keep it within the datacentre.

“I want to keep the Epos system close to me in an environment I can control, but in time it will become more cost-effective to move information and applications into the cloud,” he says.

He points out that 95 per cent of the club’s 130 users are onsite.

“We are not an organisation scattered over the world and administration takes place at one site. Currently, there is no justification to throw more applications into the cloud, but things change,” he says.

The ScanSafe technology has “enriched the user experience”, says Atkinson, which means his team is faced with fewer support queries and is able to focus on other projects. It also means the datacentre’s network is better protected.

“The Anywhere feature enforces uniform security policies on home users and roaming workers. It means that if someone takes a laptop home on Friday night, they are not going to infect the local area network on Monday morning,” says Atkinson.

The need to protect the network is paramount.

“If we suffered a denial of service attack, for example, it would impede our ability to transact with our customers and cost us money,” he says.

Taking “more tin out the network” and investing in virtualisation technology has decreased power consumption, but improving manageability of the datacentre and ensuring business continuity are Atkinson’s main concerns.

“We are moving towards a greener datacentre, but protecting the datacentre is key. Any organisation considered to be in the public eye [is a potential target] and we have to ensure that data is in more than one place at any time. Virtualisation has made onsite recovery management and replication a lot easier,” he says.

Atkinson’s plan for the datacentre is to ensure that “the organisation and systems can grow at the same pace”.

“We have room for growth over the next five to seven years. You don’t want to be going back to the board every two years and asking for extra investment,” he says.

“You don’t know what’s around the corner, so you must ensure the datacentre is able to adjust quickly to any change in business trends.”