The right prescription for business security

Chemist Warehouse is one of Australia’s most remarkable business success stories, doubling sales and growing its national store network from 100 to more than 400 stores in just five years. Now the country’s largest pharmacy group, employing more than 10,000 people, the company has also led the move to online pharmacies with five specialist e-commerce websites, dispatching orders to customers’ homes throughout the nation from a network of distribution centres.

Through previous acquisitions, the business had acquired a wide range of legacy IT systems, software, suppliers and contracts — with the inevitable wide variations in both quality and performance. This environment consumed much of management’s time, dealing with the impact of virus attacks and system downtime.

As the family-owned business embarked on its current growth strategy, it was looking for an IT security partner that could ensure complete protection of large quantities of confidential customer medical records and data, and enable the company to fully comply with its Payment Card Industry (PCI) requirements.

“We were at the start of our current journey and, in a nutshell, we needed a partner to go with us,” said IT systems manager Deni Ilic. “Even at that stage we were a large and complex business with quite specific requirements.”

After an exhaustive process including reviewing independent reports, proof-of-concept demonstrations and trials, Chemist Warehouse selected Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business Advanced.

“We felt that the Kaspersky Lab team took the time to really understand us and our business objectives, for the short and the long term, and that their solution could be shaped very precisely for our needs, then and in the future. It felt instinctively like a good fit,” said Deni.

Over the past five years Chemist Warehouse has built up a portfolio of some 4500 licences providing multilayered protection for workstation and laptop endpoints, including employees’ own devices, supported by 400 more to protect its virtual server environment.

The platform helped to provide the foundations and the confidence for a period of unprecedented growth for the business, with online transactions doubling year-on-year and 40 new retail stores opening each year.

“Kaspersky Lab is our first line of defence and is so simple to roll out each time we increase our footprint. It’s very lightweight in our server environment, easy to manage and control, and provides a consistent, repeatable, benchmark level of protection for everything we do,” said Deni.

“The central management console gives us just the right level of information and oversight we need and it’s designed with end users in mind; intuitive, easy to use and with many automated features such as remote update distribution,” added Deni.

“It is stable and reliable, it performs extremely well, has met all of our expectations, and we haven’t had any significant downtime in the five years we have been using it,” said Deni. “We are very happy with it, in particular because it has been such a solid foundation stone for us during a remarkable period of growth. Growing at the speed we have has risks attached, and the Kaspersky Lab platform has helped us to manage some of those risks very effectively.”