When you have multiple locations and technology platforms across the country, standardization is important — especially when it comes to virus protection.
For Toronto-based priszm brandz, one of Canada’s largest restaurant operators, it meant finding a solution that would protect its more than
750 KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell restaurants in 450 communities.
Priszm, the result of a joint venture merger three years ago between two restaurant operations — Tricon Global Restaurants and Scotts Restaurants — had been using a variety of security software installed on an ad hoc basis during a period of high growth, but quickly realized it needed to simply its security to gain better control and turned to Symantec Corp.
“”Tricon had already standardized on Norton AntiVirus down in the U.S. in the corporate office, but here in Canada we hadn’t really made a decision,”” says Maureen Chafe, LAN services supervisor. “”We had some Norton AntiVirus on some of our systems at the restaurant support centre and we had some that had a competitor’s product — especially in the restaurants because they are running on DOS.””
Chafe, who was originally with Tricon, says Scott’s had been using a competitive product, “”so immediately there was a desire to try to standardize. They were losing Internet e-mail and realized this product wasn’t going to be the one for them.””
The company needed something that could deployed easily on all of different restaurant systems, says Chafe.
Of course priszm’s No. 1 reason for choosing Norton AntiVirus was to protect the organization from viruses, worms and other malicious codes. But there were other features the restaurant operator wanted as well, say Chafe.
“”We wanted ease of use for our users,”” she says. “”We wanted it to be transparent to them. We didn’t want to have to put the onus on them to have to upgrade their virus definitions.””
With Norton, priszm is able to schedule daily updates and users don’t have to do anything to make sure their system is protected. “”They’re getting latest virus definitions downloaded and they don’t even know it,”” says Chafe. “”It is important to have ease of use, especially for our LAN administrators. They have a lot on their minds, they have very busy days.””
Priszm began the deployment with its restaurant support centre — it coincided with doing an e-mail conversion. “”We converted to Microsoft Exchange, and because we had to touch each client, we had a whole list of things that we did and Symantec was one of the products we were installing and configuring,”” says Chafe. “”It worked very well.””
The restaurants rarely require on-site support, she says, and they’re in a closed system — they don’t have direct access to the Internet. “”We download the virus definitions to them. They can’t run the Live Update because we don’t give them access to the Web. We send them an e-mail with the executable and they just run it.
“”We’ve never had an incident with a virus in a rest