¶ Summary
Access to critical retail and back-office systems for increasingly distributed users is a modern challenge that requires a modern solution. NuCara Pharmacy needed a simple and unified solution that could protect those users, no matter their location, and defend the company from sophisticated outside threats that constantly evolve. The solution needed to also empower administrators to configure and monitor Zero Trust network policy for authentication and access. Legacy hardware or hybrid hardware/SaaS models simply did not deliver on this.
To meet these needs while reducing hardware and enabling cloud management of the corporate network, NuCara chose Exium’s Secure Private Access for branch locations, which provides a capture point for all local users and IoT devices to direct them to a cloud CyberMesh, a management and monitoring platform that includes Next Gen Firewall, Secure Web Gateway, DNS Filtering, Zero Trust, CASB, SD-WAN and more.
“I was wanting to move to a cloud infrastructure, but the products that we had and had looked at on the market made that far too difficult. Exium really allowed me to go to the cloud safely and seamlessly.”
Eria Sabiiti,
IT Director, NuCara Pharmacy
Scalable in real time, the Exium solution empowered the company’s IT Director to maximize concise IT resources and keep each physical location and every user securely connected to critical services. No endpoint left behind and no compromise to compliance around cybersecurity.
¶ Customer Profile
NuCara Pharmacy was founded in 2017, with a mission of being passionately committed to providing diverse pharmacy and other health care products and services, emphasizing excellence, innovation, and creativity for the benefit of NuCara patients. That mission coupled with a vision to be the recognized leader in successfully identifying, developing, and delivering superior pharmacy and other health care products and services has led to tremendous growth and expansion.
The company, headquartered in Conrad, Iowa, now has nearly 100 stores across the central United States.
¶ Business Needs
With such rapid expansion, and a desire to embrace work from home and a hybrid workplace, NuCara’s IT Director, Eria Sabiiti, found that a lack of IT agility was having a severe impact on productivity. And without visibility into the network layer, there were unacceptable blind spots in security coverage, application performance and reliability.
 |
With a mixture of physical sites and remote workers, the time- consuming process of commissioning and decommissioning users on a legacy hardware-based solution was far to restrictive. NuCara’s small IT Team had problems to solve, including:
- Streamline the user and site provisioning process
- Incorporation of their growing cloud presence
- Reduce hardware-based operational bottlenecks
- Eliminate visibility blind spots
With a small-scale IT Team, and after a review of three different legacy hardware/hybrid options that would not meet the requirements, NuCara had heard about the emergence of a next generation of SASE solutions that may meet the need.
“To me, one of the best pieces is the Exium dashboard. Getting up there and configuring, adding new users,” Sabiiti said. “It was as easy as uploading a CSV file. It has been fantastic.”
In addition to the desire for operational efficiency and visibility, there was the opportunity to implement a next generation security layer for their next generation cloud-based network strategy.
¶ Solution
NuCara replaced legacy architecture with Exium’s cloud-native Secure Access Service Edge solution. The service delivers a unified portfolio of next generation security and network technologies — deployed and managed via a cloud-based control panel that also provides 24x7 real time visibility into performance, network intelligence, as well as security alerts and protections.
“In the Exim dashboard, I can take a look at all my gateways and know exactly what they're doing, see the traffic passing through them,” Sabiiti said. “The metrics, threat protections, users signing in. I don’t have to jump from one system to another. It’s been very nice.”
The OPEX solution from Exium eliminates the need for edge appliances and technology sprawl in favor of fully cloud native policy and rule enforcement that has no endpoints left behind. Every location, user, autonomous device and application destination, whether on premise, in the cloud or SaaS based is incorporated into a universal set of protections and policy that can then be uniquely configured down to a single user, device or operating system.
¶ Benefits of Exium SASE
|
No |
Benefit |
How the Benefit is Delivered? |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Enterprise Grade Security without the Construction Pain |
By leveraging the aggregate global expertise of Exium, NuCara elevated their security posture to levels normally reserved for IT teams 10x the size of NuCara’s. Exium SASE delivers complete security protections for modern, internet-based threats that evolve every single day. To do that requires a unification of technologies that coexist in harmony to ensure effectiveness. These include:
|
| 2 | Next Generation Network Tools & Performance |
It is vital to balance network performance and user experience with security that operates without compromise. This is a key aspect of the promise of SASE and Exium delivers the next generation of network controls and configurations to ensure that applications, regardless of origin, safely sing across the network for all NuCara users, agnostic to device type, location or connectivity method. Exium’s SASE Network Automation includes:
|
| 3 | Simple Same Day Provisioning & Automated Deployment |
Whether a new or relocating site, or a hybrid user that works from home, the NuCara IT team is now never caught off guard. Exium’s 100% software-based SASE provides limitless flexibility, with simplicity of deployment also at the forefront. Exium’s SASE already has full integration into all major identity management platforms, such as Azure, Google, Okta, Jump Cloud and more. In addition, Exium has integrations into major remote management tools (RMM) for point and click provisioning and ongoing management that is non-disruptive to users. |
| 4 | Cloud-Based Security & Network Management | NuCara leverages Exium’s cloud native control panel to manage all aspects of security protections, access rules and network policy. One pane of glass that authenticates users, protects traffic & devices, and guardrails access to applications based upon identity and job function. All this while providing real time visibility into security alerts, user experience, network and application performance. |
| 5 | Empowered the Modern Workplace | Because NuCara’s systems were so cumbersome, employees were reluctant to embrace the work from anywhere model that over 80% of businesses embrace. With the implementation of Exium SASE, NuCara has a security and network management system that is no longer strapped with those limitations. Employees can now work from any location and on any device and do so with absolutely no compromise to security or performance. As a result, the efficiency of mobile employees has skyrocketed. And overall employee satisfaction has improved as well. |
| 6 | Future Proofed and Simplified |
As a cloud service, Exium is constantly evolving and never static. The aggregate experience of Exium across thousands of deployments benefits every customer. NuCara wanted a solution that they could fully commit to for many years to come, and Exium delivers on that. By eliminating technology sprawl and the need to hire specialized IT and Cybersecurity talent, NuCara has experienced massive return on investment and is assured IT operational efficiencies, without a compromise to security. |