Headquartered in Milwaukee, WI, VCPI gets IT. They’re the leading technology Total Solutions Provider for the Long-Term Care industry, supporting over 1600 client facilities across the United States. Their technology services are designed to enable Long-Term Care professionals to focus on patient and resident care rather than the management of complex IT infrastructures and multiple technology vendors.

VCPI was founded in 2000 as a separate, wholly-owned subsidiary by Extendicare, Inc., one of the largest operators of long-term care and assisted living facilities in the U.S. and Canada.

Because VCPI’s clients face strict regulations relating to the health care industry, VCPI works diligently to educate and prepare clients for implementing security and regulatory best practices.

“VCPI itself, first and foremost, has a security staff,” said Joe Riesberg, IT Security and Regulatory Compliance Manager at VCPI. “Most of the organizations we work with might not even have a team that is focused completely on security.”

As part of this focus on security, the VCPI team regularly reviewed security event data on their own network, but faced many challenges when working with large amounts of data. “Security event data is so vast, there is just such a large amount of it,” said Riesberg.

In a network that supports more than 20,000 unique users and 600 devices, the IT team often sees millions of potential events daily. Simply filtering out real threats from benign network activity can be a monumental task.

To help correlate and respond to security events on their own networks, VCPI needed a solution that would help them analyze massive amounts of data in a short period of time. By doing so, VCPI hoped to do more with their resources than they otherwise could have done. The system also had to be quick and easy to implement, and user friendly.

VCPI’s focus on security had already led them to build network security into every piece of equipment on their network to keep confidential data secure and protect against unauthorized access.

However, the team needed more efficient, proactive tools for monitoring network security information. The ideal solution would be able to transform the network and security data into usable intelligence, and provide integrated tools to take action against threats as soon as they were identified.

VCPI looked across the security threat management solutions landscape, and was impressed by the Cisco Security MARS solution. “The Cisco Security MARS device allows me to take all of my data and correlate it,” said Riesberg, “For instance, if you give me three million events, I get one hundred actionable items, and that’s big. It allows me to do more with my resources than I otherwise could have done.”

The solution consists of a Cisco Security MARS appliance across 20,000 network users and 600 devices. Cisco Security MARS can monitor security events and information from a wide variety of sources, including third-party devices and hosts. With its correlation engine, vector analysis, and hotspot identification, Cisco Security MARS can not only identify anomalous behavior and security threats, but can also recommend precision removal of those elements, leading to rapid threat mitigation. In addition, Cisco Security MARS incorporates a comprehensive reporting engine that provides easy access to information for compliance reporting.

After selecting the solution, VCPI began looking for Cisco partners to help implement the solution. They selected CDW based on the depth and experience of CDW’s security team, and relied on their ability to take it from concept to completed solution.

CDW combined an experienced network engineer with a dedicated security expert, demonstrating outstanding product knowledge and network expertise.

Throughout this process, VCPI’s security team worked very closely with CDW to stay on top of any issues relating to implementation and network monitoring.

“It was very quick and easy to implement,” said Riesberg. “With the help of CDW, we came in and implemented it across our entire network in one week.”

The Results: Greater Efficiency, Lower Costs, More Flexibility Today, the VCPI security team can identify and respond to security threats more quickly and efficiently than ever before. This translates into substantial productivity increases.

The Cisco Security MARS solution has given VCPI new ways to correlate, analyze, and respond to security incidents, and has allowed the security staff to do more with less.

“There were a couple of events throughout our network that we had been seeing for some time,” said Riesberg. “In particular, over a weekend we had identified some traffic details that we discussed in the past, but were never able to pinpoint. With Cisco Security MARS, we identified this traffic on a Saturday afternoon, and we were able to find the source and destination and correct the issue just a few hours later.”