Bathgate Group

The Bathgate Group has been delivering excellence to customers across a range of products and services for over 50 years. The Cheshire-headquartered firm is now comprised of four companies—producing high quality silica sand, delivering B2B finance, as well as road haulage services. It’s also one of the largest raised access floor manufacturers in Europe.

Managing IT for such a diverse organization comes with its own distinct set of challenges, as Group IT Manager, Chris Snape, knows well. He was brought in to consolidate and streamline the environment around 18 months ago and made cybersecurity a priority. Trend Micro Worry-Free Services Advanced, delivered from the Vodafone Business Marketplace, already had a huge impact—saving significant IT time and money while minimizing the company’s risk exposure.

Bathgate’s 200 endpoints include 50 mobile devices used by the company’s delivery drivers. Combined with employees’ corporate email accounts and Microsoft 365 productivity applications, they represented a sizeable attack surface for IT to protect. The brief was to simplify endpoint and email security for Bathgate without sacrificing quality.

“When I came in, all our endpoints were individually configured and running different versions [of security software]. Plus, there was no centralized reporting, so if something happened there was no way of easily finding out,” says Chris. “What I wanted for the group was something that could be managed centrally and rely on to work by itself in the background. But also, a product that we could configure with exceptions and business rules.”

Chris was introduced to Vodafone Business, who recommended Trend Micro Worry-Free Services Advanced delivered from their Business Marketplace portal. The product offers powerful protection for endpoints, cloud apps, and email from a single solution:

• 100% SaaS delivery means no installation or maintenance headaches and aligns well with hybrid working practices
• Endpoint security features web reputation, URL filtering, high fidelity machine learning, behavioural analysis, data loss prevention (DLP), device control, and more to block ransomware and advanced threats
• Email security blocks targeted attacks, spam, phishing, viruses, spyware, business email compromise (BEC), credential phishing, and inappropriate content from impacting your business
• Collaboration security protects Microsoft services, such as Teams, SharePoint, Exchange, and OneDrive, as well as other cloud apps from unknown threats and intentional and accidental data loss

Accessing the solution from the Vodafone Marketplace portal multiplied the value for Chris by simplifying the supply chain and consolidating support with a single provider. “Trend Micro was introduced to us as an all-in-one solution well managed through the Vodafone Marketplace portal and at the right price point,” explains Chris.

The combined offering delivers powerful protection across email and endpoints, while streamlining security and offering enhanced control, according to Chris. A recent incident in which an external email was hijacked and tried to send malicious emails to employees, was detected and mitigated by Trend Micro.

“I could see via the dashboard what happened and called them to make sure they changed their password. After the first few [spam] emails came in the product learned and started to quarantine them. Inboxes get pretty much no spam at all now,” Chris explains.

"Trend Micro does what it says on the tin. It’s worry-free security which lets me get on with day-to-day tasks and other projects. [Trend Micro Worry-Free] massively reduced the number of man hours we spend on security management, and if anything needs doing hands on, it can be done from the dashboard."

Chris Snape
Group IT Manager,
Bathgate Group

Bathgate have been so pleased with the way Trend Micro and Vodafone Business have performed over the past year; they’ve decided to sign up for another year without shortlisting any competitors.