How Electric Assisted Mercari During the COVID-19 Crisis

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How Electric Assisted Mercari During the COVID-19 Crisis

Read Time: 3 minutes Published: March 25, 2020

Over the last few weeks, as COVID-19 continued to spread throughout the United States, the nature of work for both our own company and many of our customers changed dramatically.

Many organizations were forced to suddenly pivot to having a fully remote workforce in adherence to the stay-at-home orders issued across the country. Such a dramatic and sudden shift could come with an array of challenges from an IT perspective for any organization.

We’re excited to share a story about how we were able to assist one of our customers in such a critical time to ensure their operations could continue.

About Mercari

Mercari is a Japanese ecommerce company founded in February 2013 and currently operates in Japan and the United States. Electric supports the company’s ~250 users in the United States primarily based in Palo Alto, California and Portland, Oregon.

The company operates the Mercari app that allows users to sell things, they “don’t use, never used or simply outgrew.” With 150K new listings everyday, it’s not difficult to fathom how important it is for the organization to keep their systems running smoothly and data secure.

The Situation: Deploying a new antivirus solution… overnight

Prior to the crisis, Alex Rust, an IT Specialist who solely comprises Mercari’s IT team of one, was identifying and rolling out an antivirus solution across Mercari’s 250 US devices. While this initiative was a priority, he was able to take his time vetting and considering possible vendors.

Like most businesses the week of March 9th, Mercari was monitoring the COVID-19 situation, but believed they would be able to keep employees working in their offices. This however, quickly changed as new information became available with each passing day.

By March 11th, Alex was given 48 hours to ensure that all 250 devices were properly set up with both the antivirus solution and VPN access in order to prepare the company’s employees to work remotely. The problem? Only 20-30 employees had these downloaded on their machines at the time.

How Electric Helped

Mercari had just signed their deal with the antivirus solution, Sophos, days prior to this all happening. For Alex to address the issue of manually implementing it across the 200+ remaining devices would have been an impossible task given the short timeframe.

Electric was not only able to get Sophos installed on all of the devices but also set up for the company’s IT environment.

Further, because Mercari had Jamf installed by Electric across all their devices, we were able to:

  • Install the antivirus solution Sophos across all their remaining Electric-supported devices within 24 hours.
  • Identify that not all of their machines’ hard drives were encrypted, which allowed us to push FileVault to those devices not in compliance.
  • Install Tunnelblick VPN for those users whose roles required access to it.

What does the customer have to say about it?

“Electric being able to push out antivirus, VPN, and Filevault through Jamf to 250+ of our devices, with less than a 24-hour turnaround, really bailed us out of a tight spot. Having a Jamf instance through Electric really helped us out in this time of crisis.”

We know the current situation with COVID-19 can be difficult to navigate and Electric is here to support your team with their remote IT needs. Read more on how we can empower remote workforces.

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