Case Study - Café Zupas

Challenge

Café Zupas first opened its doors in 2004 with the desire to create a family-friendly restaurant where their guests could enjoy a quick meal without compromising on the nutritional benefit that real homemade food provides. To do that, Café Zupas has a clear, company-defining mission “to make each soup by hand, each dressing and sandwich spread from scratch, and create dishes just as you would at home. ” While others in the industry doubted it could be done, and particularly at scale, Café Zupas found a way to never sacrifice quality for convenience. Today, Café Zupas serves their “house-made” food at nearly 60 locations across eight different states.

As a company in the hospitality industry, Café Zupas is a prime target for cyber attack. “Being in hospitality, we are one of the most heavily targeted industries for hackers looking for credit card numbers or personal information. We have to stay ahead of the cyber criminals and on top of our PCI DSS compliance audits. We are constantly evaluating security products to make sure we have the best solutions we can,” explained Wes Beaman, CIO at Café Zupas.

Café Zupas recently set out to review their endpoint security solution. “We were using CrowdStrike, which is a good product in terms of the security it provided. But it just wasn’t offering the reporting and management capabilities that we needed,” says Beaman. In addition to CrowdStrike, Café Zupas was evaluating ESET, Trend Micro and the newest addition to the WatchGuard portfolio, Panda Adaptive Defense 360 (AD360).

Solution

Café Zupas, a longtime WatchGuard customer, deployed their first set of Fireboxes in 2014. Today, they continue to trust WatchGuard to secure their network and restaurants - with a Firebox T30 deployed at each location, M300s at the corporate headquarters and Firebox Cloud to secure their AWS environment. Additionally, the IT team is currently in the process of rolling out WatchGuard AP325 access points with Total Wi-Fi including WIPS, and analytics and engagement tools to create a Trusted Wireless Environment.

So, when it came time to evaluate potential endpoint security solutions, Café Zupas knew they needed to include the new WatchGuard endpoint platform into the mix. “As we tested the Panda AD360 product, we found that it was able to offer the same security and protection that we’d seen with CrowdStrike but provided the improved reporting and management that we were looking for,” explained Beaman. Café Zupas chose to replace their CrowdStrike deployment with WatchGuard’s premier offering, the Panda AD360 product, which combines next-generation antivirus protection with endpoint detection and response into one package for comprehensive protection against sophisticated endpoint attacks.

Result

The IT team at Café Zupas has come to expect simplified management and deployment with WatchGuard products – and AD360 was no exception. “We were able to deploy the entire solution to all of our restaurant devices and corporate endpoints in less than a week. It was really very simple,” Beaman attests. In addition to AD360, Café Zupas also chose to roll out the Advanced Reporting Tool (ART) and Panda Patch Management to each of their nearly 60 locations. “The reporting is substantially better with the Panda products. With this deployment, my senior engineer expects to save at least two hours each week managing reports. With only six people on my team managing all of the company’s IT and security needs, that’s huge.”

Best of all, Café Zupas was able to consolidate their network, Wi-Fi and endpoint security solutions under one vendor that they’ve grown to trust. “I wanted to consolidate our security products under one vendor. With the addition of the Panda products to WatchGuard’s already robust security portfolio, I’m able to do that,” said Beaman.