Chemist Warehouse is Australia’s largest pharmacy group
employing more than 10,000 people, with an annual revenue approaching A$3
billion. It has also led the move to online pharmacies with five specialist
e-commerce websites, dispatching orders to customers’ homes throughout the
country from a network of distribution centers.
This case
study looks at how Australia’s largest pharmacy group protects
customer medical record and data through
secure and reliable IT solutions.
Challenge
Founded in
2000, 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.
Through
previous acquisitions, the business had acquired a wide range of legacy IT
systems, software, suppliers and contracts. This means that the organisation is
faced with an inevitably wide variations in both quality and performance of
these IT systems. This environment consumed much of management’s time to deal
with the impact of virus attacks and system downtime.
Requirements
“We were at the start of our current journey and, in a
nutshell, we needed a partner to go with us,” Mr Deni Ilic, IT Systems Manager
at Chemist Warehouse recalled.
As the
family-owned business embarked on its current growth strategy, Chemist
Warehouse was looking for an IT security partner.
“Even at that stage we were a large and complex business
with quite specific requirements.”
With over 400 stores, 5 online pharmacies, some 4,500
licences and 400 virtual servers, the company was looking for a reliable IT
solution 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.
Solution
After an exhaustive process including reviewing independent
reports, proof of concept demonstrations, trials – and the all-important test
of personal chemistry – Chemist Warehouse selected Kaspersky Endpoint Security
for Business Advanced and Kaspersky Security for Virtualization.
“We trust them to look after our interests and in a
family-owned, family-orientated business, trust is vitally important. They are
a highly-regarded member of our extended family,” said Mr Ilic.
The high level of customer satisfaction and trust is a
result of quality product and service delivery.
“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,” he added.
Over the past five years Chemist Warehouse has built up a
portfolio of some 4,500 licences providing multi-layered protection for
workstation and laptop endpoints, including employees’ own devices, supported
by 400 more to protect its virtual server environment. The platform by
Kaspersky Lab 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.
According to Mr Ilic, the solution became the company’s
“first line of defence”.
“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,” he said.
“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. 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,” he added.
All information in this case
study is provided by Kaspersky Lab.
