Lawley Automotive Group

Zero Scareware Incidents and Increased Productivity

Automotive Dealership Takes Control and Enhances Employee Productivity with NETGEAR® UTM Appliances

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Company Profile

Industry: Auto Dealership
Organization: Lawley Automotive Group
Website: http://www.lawleycars.com

Lawley Automotive Group is southern Arizona’s largest auto dealership group. With dealerships in Arizona and New Mexico, they offer 10 new car lines including Ford, Honda, Chevrolet, Toyota, Kia, Buick, Hyundai, and Nissan, a large selection of used cars, a full-service collision center, and automotive parts and service. Headquartered in Sierra Vista, Arizona, the group prides itself on its commitment to its customers and to offering great discounts with friendly service.

Michael Christie is the Director of Information Technology for Lawley Automotive. When he joined the company in December 2009, he discovered a system that allowed employees unlimited access to the Internet. He needed a way to monitor and regulate network activity while allowing the company to move forward with new technologies like VoIP.

Background

Lawley Automotive Group started over ten years ago as a single Chevy dealership. It has grown to nine dealerships in four locations with over 150 employees. During that growth it used outside contractors for all its information technology planning and management. The contractors worked on a project basis, with no overall plan for the company’s network needs. Since there was no dedicated ownership of the network, each dealership had its own Internet connection and network of workstations with a variety of different equipment and software.

When Mike Christie took over IT for the company, he found an infrastructure of loose chaos with lots of old, unnecessary, or improperly configured equipment. There was no centralized network management for the dealerships, no company-wide policies or rules for Internet access, just point-to-point T1 connections linking the sites. And with the equipment that was in place he had no way of knowing what was going on. As Mike says, “You can’t improve something if you can’t measure it.

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