Jokers' Masquerade is an online retailer of fancy dress costumes and accessories that has seen rapid growth over the past 18 months. Such speedy evolution justified a review of the technical infrastructure with particular focus on both resilience and security in a number of key areas of the business.
Part of the requirement was to deploy new server architecture across the Internet, secured by firewall technology. The firewalls were used not only for protection, but also to create a webbed VPN connection between two offices, two servers and remote laptops. An additional requirement was to migrate email services with limited Spam and virus protection to a new, more robust infrastructure.
Mark Lewis, Managing Director of Jokers' Masquerade commented, "As an online business, we are aware of the issues we confronted, especially in the face of increased Spam and viruses. As a B2C business, we regularly face a barrage of email borne viruses from the home user, who often have inadequate, if indeed any, virus protection. Similarly, with many corporate email servers having misconfigured anti-virus defences, we are regularly flooded with responses to emails which are supposedly from us, but are in reality the result of virus emails with forged "reply-to" email headers within them. The recent "MyDoom" virus is a timely example of this. With the growth of the business in recent months, we also needed to look at balancing security with access control from two offices and other hosted server locations. We needed to work with a proficient and experienced organisation which could take our suggested recommendations and discuss and agree potential solution scenarios. Tiger Computing was an ideal choice."
The final solution was two deploy two servers for primary and secondary DNS, one handling email and the other handling web requests, prior to a planned migration of web server architecture in the summer. Each server was protected by a firewall, which were in turn connected via a VPN to each other and to each of the two offices. Enhanced Spam filtering and virus protection for email was installed which, as stated by Mark, has reduced Spam within the business with a 99.9% positive filter rate. As recommended by Tiger Computing, the business migrated from POP3 mail to an IMAP server, and also implemented a webmail interface. This allowed multi user access to one mailbox alongside the reading of emails from any machine. The IMAP solution also provided central storage for business critical email.
"The Linux operating system was an ideal choice for our topology," said Mark. "Keith and Tiger Computing were able to demonstrate tremendous knowledge in this area and left us with a comfortable feeling of experience and expertise. During the project, our requirements needed understanding of additional architecture outside of their spectrum, and Keith was happy to research this to provide a solution which worked for us. We would welcome the opportunity to work with Tiger Computing on any future projects."
