His team established an Internet connection at each store and secured it with a Sonicwall firewall. To reduce downtime, Virtual Graffiti remotely upgraded the existing firewall at Cathy Jean Shoes headquarters in Irvine, California. They then remotely walked Cathy Jean Shoes' staff through configuring each store firewall, and configured the modems to allow a direct connection to the firewall at all stores.

With secure Internet access in place, Virtual Grafitti next needed to connect each store's point-of-sale systems, which run MultiDev Chain Drive software on Windows XP computers. Virtual Graffiti connected each of the POS systems to each other and to headquarters via a secure VPN tunnel. All data transmissions are secure and meet all PCI Security Standards for transferring sensitive credit-card data.

The Outcome

The tech overhaul took several months and cost approximately $15,000. The 35-year-old shoe seller now has instant sales reports, and the machines on the network are polled several times a day to check inventory and reports.

"It's very satisfying to see everything working," says Lipschitz. "We tried to give them the power to manage the system moving forward."