The Richmond Football Club, nicknamed the Tigers, is a professional Australian rules football club playing in the Australian Football League (AFL).
Richmond Football Club, known as the Tigers in the Australian Football League (AFL), has a proud history stretching back to 1885, winning 13 premierships since its inception.
In mid-2017, Richmond Football Club called on its long-time IT support partner, Greenlight ITC, to audit its security environment and recommend upgrades. The audit confirmed what Simon Reinsch,
IT manager at Richmond Football Club, suspected after he took on the job: the company’s 15-year-old Check Point firewalls were outdated, unreliable and placed the business, as well as valuable intellectual
property, at risk.
Professional football clubs are increasingly technology-driven with player data, sports analytics and videos to help their roster improve on-field performance and maintain competitive advantage. But an inability to establish a secure VPN connection to the corporate network from a remote location, such as a training ground, stadium, house or a hotel, required Richmond Football Club’s staff to run off portable
hard drives and their own individual machines.
“They didn’t have the ability to access the data away from the club – you had to be working off hard drives or transferring the files over to a local desktop to view them,” explained Simon. “We wanted to lock that down and not just have everyone taking things off-site and using it accordingly.”
The club also needed a better way to define, set and manage security policies for its Wi-Fi network to reduce the risk of someone using it to gain administrative access to other corporate systems.
“WatchGuard just works. It gives us the confidence that our security posture will
continue to support our operations for many years to come.”
Simon Reinsch, IT Manager, Richmond Football Club
With the help of Greenlight ITC, a priority list of what to upgrade was determined and quickly approved by the club, according to Simon.
“WatchGuard had a good reputation at the price point we were looking at,” said Simon. “WatchGuard was the stand-out contender and provided exceptional value for the money while meeting high levels of security expectations, product performance and simple installation and configuration. It also offered us functionality that the club can grow into over time.”
Greenlight ITC recommended WatchGuard based on the criteria that the club was looking for in a security solution. As such, the club deployed WatchGuard Total Security Suite running on two M370 Firebox appliances in a high availability configuration at its head office in Richmond.The M370s were configured off-site and then installed over a weekend in late 2017. As the previous firewalls had been in place a long time, the policies implemented through them were not well documented. The club and Greenlight ITC manually vetted each existing policy to decide which to cut across to the new firewall and which it could simply leave behind. The exercise itself was useful and Simon explained, “It was a good thing to be able to refresh a lot of those old policies.”
By switching to WatchGuard, Richmond Football Club has had its confidence restored in its security defense. They are also able to offer the administrative staff a secure way of logging into its corporate servers and systems, which supports the club’s flexible working commitments while keeping internal data secure. “An important part of WatchGuard is its flexibility. Being able to work securely in hotels or on the road is a big thing,” Simon explained.
