At a glance
Industry: Healthcare
Customer: WELL Health Technologies
Employees: 2,500+
Headquarters: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
About: WELL Health Technologies is a multichannel digital health company and Canada’s largest owner and operator of outpatient health clinics.
Ensuring security effectiveness in a complex environment
When Iain Paterson, CISO at WELL Health Technologies met the Nagomi team before the product was built, the underlying concept intrigued him. As the Chief Information Security Officer at WELL Health Technologies, Paterson is responsible for leading a security function supporting a complex environment – supporting doctors in clinical settings as well as providing technology that enables physicians to be more agile.
“I met the Nagomi team when they were ideating on the Platform and immediately loved the concept of a tool that could tell me how effective the security tools in my environment are in reality,” said Paterson. “The question CISOs get asked by senior leadership is always ‘How protected are we?’ and the answer until now has been ‘I don’t know’. It is incredibly hard to measure that and to respond to it in a succinct way that gets the message across without deep diving into a lot of technical details that lack objective evidence as well as the challenge in that it’s the wrong context for that audience. That is what is so challenging about the CISO role, the ability to really explain how well we feel we are protected and then be able to support that with data in a precise fashion.”
Immediately after kicking off a POV, the WELL Health Technologies team identified a valuable use case: the team had deployed several endpoint tools, but there were issues with deployment. The first issue identified was an endpoint agent that pointed at the wrong console, providing an early win.
“One of the biggest benefits from Nagomi was understanding the ROI of the tools we are using. Are we actually deploying all the licenses correctly? Do we have the right overlap? Do we have whitespace? As a frequent acquirer of companies, we constantly need to ensure that an acquired company is up to our standards with the correct tooling. Nagomi facilitates this and provides that visibility quickly, improving the process of federating them into our environment,” added Paterson.
Before Nagomi – ad hoc security assurance
Before using the Nagomi Proactive Defense Platform, ensuring security tool coverage and effectiveness was an ad hoc process. With their environment constantly changing shape and growing due to acquisitions, staying on top of the tool stack was a challenging, manual process.
“What Nagomi does that is very useful is that it exposes when our vendors add new features that we didn’t know about – and that makes us more secure,” said Paterson. “That alone has been eye opening to see the capabilities that some of these tools have added that we simply never had turned on because we did not know they were there.”
Tangible benefits with Nagomi
“Nagomi hyper augments a security operations practice and makes them much more efficient,” added Paterson. “Nagomi points out immediately where they are problems and exactly how to fix them, and you can see tangible progress. That’s huge. I can then show the reporting to senior leadership along with the KPIs we are measuring. For example, if we want to maintain an 80% efficiency rate with our tools, if we’re not seeing that Nagomi can tell us where to make changes to drive increases to that score. That’s really a key benefit – reporting, immediate visibility, and the ability to know how to keep improving.”
“Everybody who runs a complex security operations program has an overlapping stack of tools that they need to understand if they are using appropriately. Especially if you have inherited an environment that has a lot of different tools, or you are acquiring companies with different toolsets Nagomi will very quickly help you understand what the posture of those things are and what the capabilities and deployment of the existing tool set is. They will help you understand if you are getting the true value.”
Iain Paterson
CISO at WELL Health Technologies
