Chick-fil-A speeds internal Web site

Tony Letts supports the Web application environment that keeps 870 Chick-fil-A restaurants in 35 states connected to corporate headquarters. The chain locations depend on the IT infrastructure at Chick-fil-A’s Atlanta office to keep their payroll applications running smoothly.

“When we implemented the Web-based payroll operations, our Web servers became even more critical,” says Letts, information security and networks team lead at the privately owned restaurant chain. “Our payroll application has a lot of sensitive data on it, and we wanted to make sure we would not overload the Web servers with the [Secure Sockets Layer] traffic.”

Letts says it didn’t take long for him to realize Chick-fil-A needed to put tools in place to ensure the corporate network and its many connections remained available. “In the past, we would just lose Internet access and have to frantically work to get the Internet back up. We needed something that if an outage occurred would still allow us to function without worry,” he says.

To better guarantee Internet connectivity and speedy Web application response times, Letts deployed Radware products across the company’s network. He needed to keep Web servers, firewalls, VPNs, cache servers and multiple ISP links connected and working continuously across locations. So Chick-fil-A’s IT team deployed Radware’s Web Server Director, FireProof and LinkProof to ensure end-to-end availability of those critical network elements.

Letts says Radware provided the tools Chick-fil-A needed to balance traffic among the lines connecting the stores. “The algorithms they have gave us the stability we needed. Now if we have an outage with AT&T or BellSouth, the load on the pipes changes, but we don’t experience any downtime,” Letts says.