Crutchfield Selects Zscaler for Web Security

Zscaler, Inc., the market leader in cloud-delivered, multi-tenant Security-as-a-Service (SaaS), today announced that Crutchfield Corporation, one of the nation’s leading catalog and Internet retailers of consumer electronics, has selected Zscaler to secure employees against Web threats and enforce business policy. The Zscaler service will protect Crutchfield’s online sales and support center as well as mobile users and corporate employees.

“After much research we realized we were looking for more than just URL filtering and anti-virus,” said Paul Fitzsimmons, senior manager, IT Systems at Crutchfield Corporation. “We needed high-speed protection from evolving, newer security threats for our call center operations, because down time or latency to those workstations can be extremely costly to the company.”

Crutchfield started as a mail order business 35 years ago and has grown to become a leading Internet retailer. Its business depends on a highly responsive call center for order processing and support call handling. Recently, they began seeing increasing number of computers becoming infected with a range of security threats coming from the Internet. Any down-time or slow down of their computer systems affects the bottom line directly. Legacy products in place offered little protection. After investigating their security options, Crutchfield decided SaaS Web security was the best approach to protect all locations and mobile users. After testing several SaaS offerings, however, Crutchfield found that most introduced significant latency, which was simply unacceptable for their online business. They were about to give up on SaaS altogether and re-review hardware appliances until they discovered and tested the Zscaler service.

Fitzsimmons continued: “Out of the five SaaS services that made it to the testing phase, Zscaler was the only one that truly delivered an ultra-low latency experience along with exceptional protection from the threats we’re seeing. And best of all, it works exactly as advertised.”

“We are proud to serve customers like Crutchfield that demand ultra-low latency and comprehensive threat detection and appreciate that URL filtering and anti-virus are not sufficient,” said Jay Chaudhry, CEO of Zscaler. “Zscaler’s purpose-built high-performance architecture with a distributed network of global data centers sets it apart from competitors that are retro-fitting traditional Web proxies to deliver SaaS.”

About Crutchfield Corporation

Crutchfield Corporation, which celebrates its 35th anniversary in 2009, is one of the nation's leading catalog and Internet retailers of consumer electronics products. Crutchfield has its headquarters and a retail store in Charlottesville. Since its introduction in 1974, the Crutchfield catalog has been a respected authority on car and home entertainment products, winning many awards for quality, design, and usefulness. The people who staff Crutchfield's call centers are noted for their high integrity, product knowledge, and technical expertise.