CASE STUDY: How did this major NZ company achieve continuity?

Digitisation has brought an abundance of opportunities for businesses. However, the journey so far hasn't been without its challenges.

Take for example, the Briscoe Group, a holding company for three very well-known retail brands in New Zealand – Briscoes Homeware, Rebel Sport, and Living - Giving.

Briscoe Group IT manager, Jeffrey Westcott manages the technology for the retail brands and is responsible for keeping IT running, even when their branch networks fail – something that was happening all too often. Despite having a GPRS backup solution in place for their Eftpos system, Westcott says the branches were experiencing network redundancy problems.

"The GPRS backup wasn't dependable and there was no alerting to modem faults," Westcott says. "This often meant that we would only become aware of faults with the GPRS modem when we most needed it.

When the time came to upgrade their Eftpos terminals, Westcott discovered that their Eftpos vendor would no longer support their GPRS backup. This meant the IT department had to find a failover solution – which in the end turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

"We had a good idea of what we wanted in a 3G/4G router," says Westcott. "It needed to be high quality, value for money, semi-industrial, reliable, easy to configure, equipped with good antennas, easy to mount, and have good product line continuity.

This list certainly narrowed down their options, but Westcott says when he saw the Cradlepoint IBR600, he knew it was exactly what he wanted – plus there was an optional management product to aid with fleet management.

"Cradlepoint solutions have provided us with a reliable backup network for our Eftpos systems and the centralised management interface has allowed us to proactively address 3G/4G network connectivity issues," Westcott says. "The end result of having the Cradlepoint routers is happy shoppers since they are no longer inconvenienced by WAN outages.

When asked if he would recommend Cradlepoint to other businesses, Westcott's answer was simple: "Absolutely.

Click here to find out how Cradlepoint's solutions can ensure continuity at your business.