Meet our Under Cover Tech Team

Working behind the scenes, often under the cover of darkness to keep our systems functioning better, faster, safer and stronger!

Since the year began, our IT Team has been feverishly working behind the scenes to ensure the safety and security of SanMar Canada! Not everything they do is seen by us all, so we wanted to let you know a few things that they have done over the year.

Not only did the IT Team set us all up to work efficiently, but they had to keep our work information and personal information safe too. The use of Cloud services, smart devices, and Single Sign-On add more opportunities for the bad guys.

They have been working very hard to keep up with the trends while continuing to invest and deploy the latest technologies and infrastructure to protect everybody, not just company assets but our personal assets as well since everything is now connected.

They are not only battling human hackers but also artificial intelligence driven hacking tools which never sleep and are always evolving. They’ve incorporated the concepts to help with data loss prevention, information/application governance, threat detection, information & email compliance and typical malware and spam filtering.

Work-From-Home Transformation and Digitalization
Since the pandemic, the support team has deployed/upgraded over 120+ endpoints and digitalized most system processes to fully support the WFH reality – this includes over 60 new computers and virtual machines, 30 IP phones, 30+ sets of accessories. They’ve also recently upgraded 200+ security endpoints on PCs and servers in order to have proper security. Needless to mention tremendous amount of time spent on remotely supporting our teams, which is more time consuming but a new norm these days.

Email Security
Email security and filtering requires constant revisiting and adjustments. From time to time, we find ourselves over protected, but the IT Team assures that for every false positive, 10 or more spam and social engineered attacks are caught behind the scenes.

Thank you to everyone for setting up “Multi-Factor Authentication” which helps to block thousands of brute force login attacks and keep your account safe.

Network Access and Bandwidth
Network access and bandwidth have been under unprecedented pressure since the beginning of the year. The IT Team sourced out and worked to remove the physical limits and/or have raised those limits by 10x or more.

They’ve also improved network resilience, so that there is no single point of failure even for our remote sites. What this means is that even when our service providers have an outage, like many have had nationally over the past year, our core systems and networks like call centres and VPN home phones, have not been noticeably affected.

Security Patching
They have increased the frequency of security patching on all of our systems. All of our servers and websites are either running on the cloud with monitored security or virtualized to allow fast replication and recovery. This includes cross-site, real-time replication for our critical systems. Now, no single piece of hardware or breach will put us in a completely unrecoverable state.

Sites running on the Cloud
All of our websites are running on a public cloud platform – that’s a fast-growing aspect for security and performance tuning. They’ve made numerous adjustments on how those server instances are sized and utilized, not just for performance but also for taking advantage of the service savings plans offered by the hosting providers. We’ve defeated and mitigated several rounds of attacks, the result is we now have our own customized protection/detection mechanism against common attacks. Earlier in the year our main site was migrated onto Content Distribution Network and now they’re working on a major upgrade again on the primary site to take advantage of all the new features and security standards.

Proud of our new builds as well!
The new Flyer Creator and Image Library were built from scratch and are now 100% owned and operated by us with upgraded functionality and higher efficiency internally, meaning that we can make adjustments faster and easier than ever before.

NEW API/ EDI
APl/EDI integration with our PICK system is one major service commitment that will allow us to move into the future with and for our customers. We’ve adopted Promo Standards as our EDI platform, which is an open-standard platform founded by major promotional industry leaders.

They have implemented and launched Product Data and Inventory systems, and just pilot-launched the Purchase Order module, helping our e-commerce customers set up their systems better, faster, simpler.

Cycle Count Automation
They have also set up Cycle Count Automation for our Operations teams to achieve greater efficiency, accuracy and integrity on inventory management.

A lot of the times these upgrades and innovations are transparent and usually done behind the scenes in the middle of night and/or weekends. You and our customers are probably seeing the same site, but things behind the scenes have become better, faster, stronger, and safer for all. Technology and security demands never stop changing, so we have to either keep evolving with it or fall behind.

Every single one of us is touched in some way by the work that the IT Team does and although we may not see all of the work they’ve accomplished, we are safer and more secure for all that they do.

Thank you to our Incognito IT Team for all that you do,
The Authentic T-Shirt Company^®/SanMar Canada 

Download PDF – Meet our Under Cover Tech Team