Jenny Craig upgrades WAN to 500 sites

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February 15, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Weight management company Jenny Craig Inc. needed to upgrade its wide area network to improve security and availability of data sent daily to headquarters from 500 locations in North America.

In deciding on an upgrade path, privacy of data was paramount, said Alessandra Nicoletti, director of strategy at Jenny Craig. That's because the data sent from the weight management centers to headquarters in Carlsbad, Calif., contains private information about customers, including their weight and the steps being taken to manage their weight, she said.

"We needed to figure out a secure solution for ... polling data and doing it quickly over the Internet with a fail-over solution," Nicoletti recalled.

Last year, Jenny Craig hired Igmas Technologies Inc. as an integrator, and together they chose SonicWall Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., to provide WAN technology, including hardware that allows deep-packet inspection for viruses and management and monitoring capabilities.

By last week, 53 Jenny Craig Centres had been deployed with SonicWall TZ appliances, which transmit data from Wi-Fi access points to the company's headquarters via DSL. "DSL has been sketchy, so we needed fail-over to dial up," which the TZ appliances also provide, Nicoletti said.

All 500 locations should be deployed with the gear in about six months, she said.

In addition to fail-over, the appliances allow for Triple DES encryption. "No way can anybody get to the data," Nicoletti said. If the system detects intrusions or other problems, transmissions are locked down. The new system will allow for expansion and has eliminated the need for two employees to handle the older dial-up-only transmissions. One of those workers has left the company and the other has been assigned to other IT tasks, she said.

SonicWall provides two PRO firewalls at the headquarters that monitor the appliances in the field and will eventually allow the company to deploy security policy configurations on the completed 500-center network.

Nicoletti would not disclose the cost of the project, but said several firewall technologies were evaluated and SonicWall "gave us the best bang for the buck." She said she considered Fortinet Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc., but at the time, Cisco did not incorporate Triple DES encryption.

"SonicWall beat them hands down, and cost was the controlling factor," especially because some of the Jenny Craig locations are run by franchisees who needed the costs kept under control, she said.

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