One of the first things someone recognizes when they visit a Red Robin Gourmet Burger restaurant is the extent to which its core values—honor, integrity, continually seeking knowledge, and having fun—permeate its operations. These are more than simply slogans embroidered on the sleeves of every Team Member uniform. They are embodied and celebrated thousands of times each year through the company’s “Unbridled” culture that inspires random acts of kindness. These are captured via stories of Team Members who enact core values in their daily interactions with each other and guests.

These core values touch all aspects of the business, including the IT team that approaches them as seriously as any other team at Red Robin. “Instead of making IT a function in the company, we’re focused on making IT an experience,” says VP and CIO Chris Laping. “This is the first assignment in my career where I don’t have to build a subculture in IT. I only have to ensure that the IT team is as cool as the rest of the company.”

The essential IT ingredient

When Laping joined Red Robin two years ago, he inherited an IT team that included Red Robin-veteran Bill Randall. “Bill has not assimilated to the culture,” Laping notes, “He is the culture.”

An avid cyclist and runner who also rides a Harley Davidson motorcycle, Randall, the director of IT at Red Robin, worked in restaurant operations before taking his first IT assignment 12 years ago—and he has never looked back. “His blood is the same shade of red as our brand color, and he naturally aspires to the different components of our corporate culture,” Laping asserts. “Red Robin team members simply want to hang out with Bill. He is a very meticulous and detailed thinker. When combined with his business acumen and character, the end result is a mirror embodiment of Red Robin’s corporate values.”

Serving up results

The metric of success for Laping, Randall, and the rest of the IT team is progress. “We want to make sure we’re driving towards the things that are going to add value to the organization,” Randall says. “At the end of the day, if we aren’t doing something that will help the company be more efficient, save money, sell more burgers, or enhance the experience of our guests, then we’re headed down the wrong road.”

IT is managed as a strategic function at Red Robin. Laping and his team have a three-year strategic IT plan in place. As part of this process, Laping formed a business transformation team tasked with serving as a liaison between IT and the business. In addition, Laping assembled a technology prioritization team that is comprised of representatives from every business group, including the operations team, and Laping and his team rely on the team to prioritize their IT efforts.

“The goal for the business transformation team is to speak ‘English’ to the business and then speak ‘bits and bytes’ to the IT team to make sure everything gets done behind the curtain,” he explains. “Not every dollar we spend on IT is going to yield the same dollar of value, and we choose to work on the initiatives that matter most to the business.”

“You hear the expression ‘IT runs like a business’,” Laping continues. “And while we certainly look at the financial aspects of our operations, we must have a great marketing and communications strategy—a multi-channel strategy that looks at getting the message out at all levels of the company.”

Strategic progress

As the technology prioritization team includes members from every business group, their cumulative perspective helps the IT team avoid point solutions that address just one segment of the business. “We look at solutions that address broader company objectives and can be leveraged by different business groups,” Randall says. And while cost reduction and avoidance are certainly factors for the team, they are not the overriding business driver. “These things become a self-perpetuating trap that do not necessarily help the business move forward,” Randall emphasizes.

This strategic approach spills over into how the Red Robin team works with its technology suppliers. “Seeking knowledge is one of our core corporate values, and Bill does this extremely well,” Laping says. “He seeks to ‘partner’ with our technology providers versus treating them as vendors that provide a transaction.” Indeed, this is what led Randall to Symantec earlier this year

Virtualized backup and recovery

The relationship between Red Robin and Symantec dates back a number of years. Veritas NetBackup has been the standard for backup and recovery at Red Robin longer than Randall has been at the company. The solution has grown with the company, including accommodating a 35 percent annual growth rate in backup volumes, and evolved as its data protection requirements have changed.

For example, when the team virtualized their Microsoft Windowsbased data center environment using VMware software, they were able to leverage NetBackup’s support for VMware Consolidated Backup. Having a standard view of all backup jobs remains a core value to Randall and his team. “The centralized management console provides us with a single view into all of our backup jobs,” Randall says.

Securing and managing the endpoint

Late last year, when Randall and his team began looking at different ways to address endpoint security, data loss prevention, archiving, and e-discovery—issues identified by the business transformation team as critical to the business—they included Symantec as one of the technology providers in their conversations.

Red Robin had relied on Symantec AntiVirus for a number of years. However, Randall and his team needed a more comprehensive approach to address their endpoint security requirements. “The edge of our network continues to expand, and the number of endpoints has proliferated,” he says.

“We have a number of remote workers who sporadically log into the network. We needed to validate each of those endpoints to ensure that they were secure,” Randall says. In addition, though the team largely uses commercial-offthe- shelf applications, a certain amount of custom development is required to facilitate integration between each of them. “We needed a more effective means to deploy these solutions across their clients and servers respectively,” Randall adds.

After evaluating several different solutions, Randall and his team opted to upgrade to Symantec Endpoint Protection and to implement Altiris Total Management Suite (consisting of Altiris Client Management Suite, Altiris Server Management Suite, and Altiris Service & Asset Management Suite) with the help of Symantec Partner XCEND Group. “Flexibility and manageability were key for us,” he reports. “We’re able to configure clients so that they can get updates—regardless of whether they’re inside or outside of the network—using Altiris Client Management Suite.” To address those outside the firewall, Randall and his team configured a collector outside the firewall into which clients report all of the time, all without any end-user intervention.

The team also relies on Altiris Server Management Suite for their data center servers. “It works very well with our virtualized server infrastructure,” Randall says. “We can quickly stand up machines within the VMware environment; the process has been made much more consistent with Altiris Server Management Suite.”

The Red Robin team leverages most of the functionality available in Symantec Endpoint Protection. Randall explains: “Beyond antivirus, antispyware, and intrusion prevention, we instituted workplace policies on all of our machines using application control. As a result, our network exposure is dramatically reduced, as we have improved control of applications that might be installed on our systems.”

Tracking and reporting inventory and assets was also a laborand time-intensive effort for the team. Once a year, Randall had to allocate a headcount from his team for approximately two weeks to conduct an audit of software and hardware systems. With Altiris Service & Asset Management Suite, they have been able to automate the process.

Complying with data loss prevention

Randall explains that compliance with regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard created an “opportunity for IT to provide tangible value back to the business.” He and his team faced two essential challenges. And while they looked at several alternatives, they ultimately selected Symantec Data Loss Prevention on the basis that it was the best solution given the associated requirements.

The first challenge involved the need to automate the identification of information and then ascertain who should have access to it and where it can be sent. With Symantec Data Loss Prevention, they are able to establish a policy and then set enforcement in line with the level of IT risk exposure. The second pertained to the discovery of information—whether on the network, in storage systems, or on endpoints. “We needed a solution that would allow us to delve into files that had been tucked away in a folder four years ago unknown to everyone in the organization,” Randall notes.

Archiving of unstructured data

Storage of unstructured data was becoming an increasing concern for the Red Robin team. Storage requirements for not only Microsoft Exchange, but also Microsoft SharePoint Server and fi le and print data were growing at an annual rate of 35 to 40 percent.

The team established three evaluation components in their search for a solution and ultimately selected Symantec Enterprise Vault and engaged Symantec Consulting Services for deployment assistance. First, in the case of Microsoft Exchange, the amount of data being stored had begun to impact system performance. “Our end users rely on email as their filing system,” Randall says. “We wanted to fi nd a solution that would deliver optimal service to our end users while rectifying the performance issues with the Exchange environment.”

Second, retention policies and discovery were critical for Randall and his team’s evaluation of solutions as well. “We needed the ability to archive and expire data based on compliance requirements,” Randall says.

Finally, archiving requirements extended beyond Microsoft Exchange to Microsoft SharePoint and fi le and print data. With more than 10 terabytes of data between all three stores, all residing on tier-one storage, Red Robin stood to achieve signifi cant cost reduction through single-instance archiving and data compression, as well as the ability to archive to a less-expensive tier. “We’re hoping for a 40 percent decrease in our data stores, along with as much as a threefold reduction in storage-per-gigabyte cost,” Randall says.

Rapid transformation

What’s interesting about Symantec’s solutions is that Randall and his team rolled all of them out over a period of four to fi ve months. For many IT organizations, all of these initiatives would have been more than enough work for an entire year or more. However, for a team as closely aligned with the business and its core values as the Red Robin team, the challenge was simply perceived as a lot of fun and a chance to seek out new knowledge.

With this type of approach, one that includes strategic collaboration with diff erent business groups, the IT team is proving to be a key ingredient in the company’s recipe of success, thereby helping the “Red, Red Robin to Keep Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along.”¹

¹ The founder of the original Red Robin restaurant near the University of Washington sang in a barber shop quartet. He reputedly loved to sing Harry M. Wood’s 1926 classic, “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along,” and renamed his restaurant after the song (from Sam’s Tavern to Sam’s Red Robin).

Patrick E. Spencer (Ph.D.) is the editor in chief for CIO Digest and the author of a book and various articles and reviews published by Continuum Books and Sage Publications, among others.