Motel 6 Delivers Fast and Secure Online Reservations Experience With Crossbeam

BOXBOROUGH, Mass., July 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Crossbeam Systems, Inc. announced today that Motel 6 is using the Crossbeam X-Series security platform to ensure that its security applications and policies do not hinder a seamless e-commerce experience for travelers booking rooms at its more than 1,100 company-owned and franchised locations throughout the United States and Canada. With the Crossbeam X-Series, Motel 6 solved what had become a brand-affecting problem for the business: how to ensure traveler security during the online reservations process without slowing the network or negatively affecting the user experience.

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"Our security infrastructure wasn't keeping up with the growing number of travelers using our online reservations system," said Andrew McCullough, lead infrastructure security architect, Information Security & Compliance Department, at Motel 6. "This not only impacted revenue because of customers' tendency to leave sites at the first sign of performance problems, it was detrimental to our brand. Motel 6 prides itself on delivering superior customer service. When this started happening, we knew it was critically important to re-evaluate our security infrastructure."

Motel 6 deployed the Crossbeam X-Series platform running third-party, best-in-class firewall software to deliver high-performance, highly scalable protection for its e-commerce traffic. "All the problems we faced with our e-commerce site, including the need to reboot our firewalls daily and unplanned outages, literally disappeared overnight once we deployed Crossbeam," said McCullough.

In addition to solving its security performance issue, McCullough recognized that Motel 6 could realize greater long-term benefits with Crossbeam's unique open architecture, which allows organizations to consolidate security infrastructure by using a single X-Series to manage and provision multiple security applications from best-in-class ISVs (independent software vendors).

"Our risk reduction strategy is to use the best products on the market for all security applications," added McCullough. "Crossbeam is the only provider who lets us take the security applications we trust from multiple vendors and consolidate them onto a single platform to achieve extremely scalable, low-latency security. This level of protection and management simplicity is exactly what we need to handle the demands of our environment, without sacrificing the online reservations experience for Motel 6 customers."

Motel 6 currently plans to deploy additional security applications on the X-Series over the next year to realize the full potential of the platform.

"Motel 6 experienced a challenge we see time and again: customers struggling to meet their security requirements and support users, without impacting the business," said Jim Freeze, chief marketing officer for Crossbeam. "Instead of sacrificing its security posture to gain better performance – which many organizations do – Motel 6 chose to address the requirements of its network, and is using the X-Series to build a high-performance, best-in-class security infrastructure that will allow the company to maintain superior levels of customer service."

For more information on the security versus performance challenge, read about Crossbeam's 2011 survey on this topic: Crossbeam Survey Reveals That IT Security Personnel Are Making Dangerous Security Trade-Offs to Meet Business Demands.

About Crossbeam 
Crossbeam Systems®, Inc. offers a proven approach to deploying network security that meets the extreme performance, scalability and reliability demands of large enterprises, service providers and government agencies. Its leading X-Series security platform offers an open, high-performance architecture that easily provisions and scales multiple best-in-class security applications to meet the ever-changing threat landscape. Companies rely on Crossbeam to intelligently manage risk, accelerate and maintain compliance, and protect their businesses from evolving threats. Crossbeam is headquartered in Boxborough, Mass., and has offices in Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific. More information is available at www.crossbeam.com.

Crossbeam Systems and Crossbeam are registered trademarks of Crossbeam Systems, Inc. All other company, product or service names not owned by Crossbeam mentioned in this press release are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE Crossbeam Systems, Inc.