Woodgreen – Securing critical infrastructure at a leading animal charity

One of the country’s most famous pet charities, Woodgreen has turned to managed services provider Espria to identify its at-risk touch points and to implement a Sophos solution to secure them.

Woodgreen is a charity which helps pets and their people. Every year, their dedicated teams work tirelessly to provide safe shelter, specialist care, and a brighter future for thousands of dogs, cats and small pets. And they support owners in need of advice and support with their pets – on the phone, online and in person.

Based in Godmanchester, Cambridgeshire, the organisation has several full-time employees supported by a network of volunteers who help with fundraising, fostering and staffing their charity shops, including an onsite outlet.

Matthew Bailey, Client Manager at Espria, said, “We have a long-standing relationship with Woodgreen, dating back some 20 years. Given the fact it is a charity, it has always been a lean operation. As a trusted partner to Woodgreen we have always been there to help identify and implement IT projects to support them, given they do not have a dedicated, extensive in-house IT team.”

With not only full-time employees and hundreds of volunteers, keeping everyone at Woodgreen safe from cybercrime is seen as a major challenge. Most staff and volunteers connect at least one device to the charity network – which includes retail outlets.

Keeping staff and volunteers’ data protected and the charity’s systems and services available is central to its operations.

Peter Sumpter, Senior Systems Administrator at Woodgreen, added: “Woodgreen had used an on-prem Sophos solution since 2016, which proved to be effective for us, adding considerably to the value of our security operations. However, we felt from a business perspective we needed to migrate to a cloud-based solution that would be easier for our administrators to protect our community of users.”

Woodgreen therefore turned to its trusted partner Espria to upgrade to Sophos Central. The new solution was selected to address a number of key priorities for Woodgreen. This included the reduction of manual processes through increased automation to reduce threat response times and minimise repetitive manual tasks. 

The implementation of Sophos Central by Espria was a smooth process and the migration moved at a steady pace, in line with Woodgreen’s requirements.

Peter continued, “Given we have such a lean IT team at the charity the new Sophos solution means that we can focus our time on high-priority tasks, as it has automated so many traditional jobs.

The Sophos solution now provides us with layered protection in addition to Microsoft Office 365, keeping our staff, volunteers and retail teams, devices, and server safe from online threats.

By implementing Sophos Central we have seen improvements in how our security operations function works. We really like the new interface – more of what we do within Sophos Central is automated or simplified, saving us time. We can now focus on what we are known for – the welfare of animals – knowing we have not only the most effective security solution available but safe in the knowledge that Espria has our back, as it has done over the past couple of decades,” concluded Peter.