How Brazil's second-largest pharmacy chain converged security and connectivity across all its stores with Fortinet Secure SD-WAN — with Network Secure as its deployment partner.
Pague Menos is Brazil's second-largest pharmacy chain, with about 1,600 stores and more than 25,000 employees, including the acquisition of Extrafarma in August 2022. Besides medicines, its stores offer health services, lab tests, vaccines and teleconsultations, and the company runs an omnichannel model with e-commerce, an app and in-store pickup.
In 2016, with more than 900 stores and an ambitious growth plan, Pague Menos's network was already showing it would not support the expansion. The company depended on two carriers — where they had no service, the store could not open either. The MPLS links offered very limited bandwidth, used mainly for card payments, and the satellite backup was slow.
The priority was to connect the entire store network efficiently and securely, to support new customer services, real-time sales tracking and online sales.
After evaluating several vendors, Pague Menos chose Fortinet. With the support of Network Secure, Fortinet's local partner, it converged network security and communications across all corporate offices and stores, in every Brazilian state.
Both provided the support we needed and stayed with us throughout the whole process.
locations with Secure SD-WAN, with high availability of the network infrastructure.
Fortinetnew digital services available to customers in real time.
Fortinetfor full visibility and management of the entire network.
FortinetFor Joaquim Garcia, VP of IT at Pague Menos, the biggest gain was availability and quality: services such as lab tests run in real time and depend on good network performance. The company also began opening new branches faster and, with the Extrafarma acquisition, has a platform ready to scale.
Sources: Fortinet case study (2022) and Security Leaders (12/13/2022).
As Fortinet's local partner, Network Secure helped Pague Menos converge network security and communications across all its corporate offices and stores, in every Brazilian state, with Fortinet Secure SD-WAN on FortiGate firewalls.
FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall, Fortinet Secure SD-WAN, FortiAP for secure in-store Wi-Fi, FortiADC for application delivery, and FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer for centralized management and event and threat reporting.
According to Fortinet's case study, the network now supports about 1,600 stores with high availability, 60 new real-time digital services and full network visibility from a single dashboard.
Talk to an expert and see how Network Secure deploys and operates network security for multi-site operations.