Scaling Peavey Industries’ Storage and Security for Tomorrow and Beyond
As Peavey Industries underwent a rapid expansion, here’s how CDW Canada ensured their IT grew with them.
Peavey Industries is the parent company of Peavey Mart, MainStreet Hardware and ACE Canada; stores that offer customers everything they could possibly need to maintain their farms, ranches, homes and livestock. With over 150 stores across Canada, Peavey Industries, a 100 percent Canadian and employee-owned farm and ranch retail banner, engaged CDW Canada to ensure their technology infrastructure scaled and supported their ongoing growth.
“When I joined Peavey Industries in 2021, I recognized that some of our critical technology infrastructure was in need of upgrades due to end of life systems,” said Shaun Guthrie, SVP, Technology and Ecommerce at Peavey Industries. “Having developed a strong trust with CDW Canada throughout my career and based on their solid reputation in the industry, they were the first company I reached out to.”
“I knew CDW intimately understood our needs,” continued Guthrie. “I can come to them with any project or problem, and they’ll give it to me straight – that’s what a true technology partner looks like.”
With rapid growth comes the need for new technology
Throughout the pandemic, Peavey underwent a massive growth initiative. As Canadians spent more time maintaining, renovating and upgrading their properties, Peavey was there to meet this increased demand. However, there were concerns about whether their technology could keep up.
“Our data storage systems and cybersecurity lagged behind the growth of our physical stores,” said Guthrie. “When you have over 150 stores and growing, you need those stores to have that consistent look and feel from a technology perspective.”
Part of supporting this expansion meant ensuring the technology at all locations was operating at a reliable level to serve Peavey’s loyal customers.
“A lot of our rural locations have very limited access to reliable internet services,” said Guthrie. “Prior to working with CDW, we had at least one to two stores that would go offline throughout the week. That severely impacted our business as we couldn’t perform the tasks required to meet our customers’ needs.”
CDW used its deep industry knowledge to help implement redundant internet connectivity, supported by Fortinet SD-WAN, in each of the Peavey stores. This ensured a strong backup connection was in place in the event of internet service loss. CDW experts acted as Fortinet certified staff and architects to configure the networks properly, allowing the Peavey team to implement and monitor the internet connectivity remotely on an ongoing basis.
“Fortinet has a great ecosystem of products. The connected fabric they have ensures visibility into the transmission of that data and that its shared across all devices and that’s what's important. It provides insight into what's going on behind the scenes under a single pane of glass,” said Guthrie.
“Since CDW worked on that project, it is extremely rare that a store loses internet service,” said Guthrie. “Our customers now shop at our stores with confidence that their transactions are processed efficiently and securely for a seamless shopping experience.”
Further, Peavey’s locations in rural areas make it difficult to have onsite technology staff to deal with issues at each store – that’s where CDW’s cross-country experts come into play.
“CDW’s on-call experts can quickly get to our stores, regardless of location and help out in a pinch,” said Guthrie. “We know that CDW has the staff to assist us coast-to-coast. If something goes wrong in High Prairie, Alberta or Bedford, Nova Scotia, we know who to call.”
Supporting expansion with storage and security
To properly scale Peavey’s growing locations, increased server storage was a must. CDW replaced Peavey’s legacy storage with two Dell Powerstore 5200Ts in their Red Deer, AB and London, ON offices. “The new storage from Dell is so flexible, and their anytime upgrades ensure that we are not just set for today, but future-proofed for years ahead,” said Guthrie.
Upgrading storage to scale for current and future growth is important, but ensuring your entire technology infrastructure is secure and accounted for is non-negotiable in today’s cyberthreat landscape.
“CDW conducted a cyberthreat risk assessment for us where they reviewed Peavey’s security posture against the Center for Internet Safety Top 20 Critical Security Controls,” said Guthrie. “This helped identify where our gaps were and what we needed to focus on to ensure our security posture can deal with the current sophistication of bad actors.”
CDW’s threat risk assessment team provided a detailed report identifying Peavey’s strengths and weaknesses and highlighting potentially harmful blind spots.
“A holistic understanding of your organization’s cybersecurity posture is a must-have in today’s threat landscape,” said Marko Ilic, Executive Account Manager at CDW Canada. “We pride ourselves on not only highlighting areas of concern, but working with our customers to advise them on logical next steps for improvement and what the budget looks like to get there.”
“CDW showed us where we need to make those key investments so that we're not blindly wasting our budget on things that we're already doing well or don't address risk,” continued Guthrie. “More importantly, the threat risk assessment gave us a road map for the next three years, pointing out where we need to focus our efforts to ensure that we're maturing our security posture appropriately – and that’s worth its weight in gold.”
A partnership built on trust for years to come
Shaun Guthrie has been in the technology industry for over 23 years and knows what he’s looking for in a technology partner.
“The trust and the relationship gets deeper with each project that we do with CDW,” said Guthrie. “Because I trust this strong relationship, when problems occur, I know I can come to CDW and figure out the solution together. We can move on quickly instead of tiptoeing around solutions as this is a deeply invested partnership.”
