Growing healthcare provider offers specialized care with a simplified security solution

Challenge:

A large, private, non-profit healthcare provider helps thousands of patients daily, offering specialized care in mental health and social services, substance abuse, developmental disabilities, and special education programs.

The healthcare provider underwent some significant changes and needed a new cybersecurity solution that could keep up with – and ease – their growth. With new leadership in place, the customer had sister companies requiring consolidation under one brand across several locations. Timing was another driving factor, as they were building a new headquarters, along with end of support approaching for their existing technology solution.

As threats continue to become more advanced every day, these drivers led to an evaluation of their security posture. The customer determined the need to switch to a simplified licensing model with a reliable network solution they could manage from a centralized location. Cost was also key, as they sought a less expensive alternative to their legacy licensing model.

Solution:

SHI has worked with the customer for several years as an established partner in their IT journey, managing their enterprise agreement, supporting the majority of commodity hardware and software purchases, and supporting a wide range of roles and departments.

After learning of the customer’s security concerns, we held discovery calls to thoroughly understand their wants and needs in a new offering. SHI experts identified Fortinet as a compatible, high-performing security solution and ensured they could fulfill the specific requirements before introducing their team to demo. We also presented another leading vendor to demo their products, discussing the different options over regular cadence calls with the customer’s team.

Result:

The healthcare provider chose Fortinet as the best fit, with the greatest value and range for their use case. Fortinet offered an easy bundle of products, fulfilling their need for less complexity and more automation, visibility, and integration.

Upon deployment, Fortinet immediately made an impact on their security operations. With 300+ locations and growing, the customer was able to outfit their sites with the greatest immediate need. They implemented FortiGate firewalls for end-to-end security and threat protection and replaced their aging unified communications system with FortiVoice Gateway and 400 FortiFones.

The project enabled the customer to pursue additional initiatives with SHI and Fortinet’s product suite – expanding across their sites with 100+ of equipment purchases, including access switches and core switches. Some significant upgrades included FortiAnalyzer, FortiManager, FortiClient Endpoint Management Server (EMS), FortiAuthenticator, and FortiSwitches (100, 200, 400, 500, and 1000 Series). The partnership is ongoing, with current discussion over a five-year enterprise licensing agreement (ELA) with extended detection and response (XDR)/managed detection and response (MDR) at 5K units.

Due to SHI and Fortinet’s cost savings, the customer reallocated funding to other technologies and projects, including new laptops for their facilities.