WhiskyTree is a content creation company, equal parts agency and production company. And we also happen to be a computer graphics powerhouse.Our bread and butter work is feature film visual effects. You’ll also find our work in television commercials, augmented reality, virtual reality, pretty much anywhere the computer graphics can be used. Our clients are as demanding as they get with their requirements for security. In fact, it, it’s not obvious, but most of our workstations, in fact all of our production workstations cannot have a direct connection to the internet. That’s a direct demand from our clients. And how do you solve a problem like that? That’s where Spikes comes in. Think of it as having a portal to the internet without specific security vulnerabilities.

Yeah. Well there was certainly uh, a span of time when we were transitioning from having full access to the internet to having new security measures that limited that access severely, and then all of a sudden stopped that access completelyso during that transition we had Find new ways to, to still do what we needed to do. And that’s where Isla kind of came in and helped fill that gap for us.

Artists and technicians absolutely have to have access to the internet, and the way we get that done is with the Spikes’ product, Isla. Think of it as having a portal to the internet without specific security vulnerabilities.

Um, so the main thing your typical user wants is it to feel just like the internet. They want, they want it to be transparent, they, they don’t care, they, they just want it to be a web browser and 99% of the time, that’s what it feels like.

From the perspective of does this help us win new business? Yes, without question because many of our clients actually mandate that certain security protocols must be in place. With a solution like Isla, we can guarantee that our internet security protocols are what any of our clients would require just to do business with them in the first place.

If Isla did not exist today, the way we, we would deal with this issue is by having literally double the number of computers in this building. We would have one workstation that could visit the internet and one workstation that could not visit the internet. And those two workstations would have to be on completely separate networks. They could not speak to each other. We’d essentially have to double our investment in basically all our workstations. But with Isla, we can forego that.

the Spikes team and their support has been great. They’ve been very interactive in the development of their product. They’ve kept us well ahead, well ahead of updates. And I, I always feel like we stay on the cutting edge because I know these guys, they want the best for us. So it feels like that’s what we get.

So initially Isla was a little rough around the edges but with our feedback and their quick response, um, personalized service, uh, they would make updates and patches and whatever we had it was fixed. And today it’s pretty transparent. Um, it feels more invincible, it feels most, most people think you’re just using a web browser.

I think the biggest concern for us here is keeping the bad stuff out and the good stuff in. With Isla, that’s just what we get done.