How CDW Helped WeCook Meals Build a Strong Cybersecurity Posture
CDW Canada supported WeCook Meals’ rapid growth through step-by-step security services, ensuring that their data remained safe and secure.
In 2020, pandemic restrictions were in place and a trip to the grocery store felt like an epic journey. Meal subscription services boomed in popularity and Québec’s own WeCook Meals, a leading meal subscription company delivering high quality, perfectly portioned, ready-to-eat meals, met demand head-on and experienced tremendous growth. However, an influx of online subscriptions brought a massive amount of private information to protect and WeCook Meals’ cybersecurity needed to be improved rapidly.
“We were constantly hearing stories of other companies experiencing harmful data breaches,” said Karan Behl, Manager, Software Development and Technology at WeCook Meals. “Paired with our growing customer base and internal team transitioning to hybrid work meant we needed to get a handle on our cybersecurity. CDW Canada tailored their security services to our exact needs, providing us with comprehensive testing and planning to ensure we could stay ahead of cyberthreats.”
WeCook Meals continues to expand its operations, delivering more than 4 million meals a year throughout Québec and Ontario, created by an in-house chef using ingredients sourced from local suppliers in a zero-waste facility.
Building a strong security posture from the ground up
Before Behl joined the WeCook Meals team in 2020, there was only one person handling IT administration, meaning that it wasn’t feasible to keep detailed activity logs. At the same time, WeCook Meals’ administration team was growing rapidly – it went from 25 people to 130 over the course of two years – and this factored into Behl engaging CDW Canada as a trusted IT partner to get operations up to speed.
“Whenever I needed technical advice, I could always turn to CDW Canada,” said Behl. “They worked with me to develop security operations at WeCook Meals so we could support our rapid expansion with an overhauled IT operation.”
Working with Behl, CDW Canada was able to develop, audit and update WeCook Meals’ IT governance and security procedures to keep employee and customer data safe while the company grew. The CDW Canada team also ran a security health assessment and developed a road map, which provided WeCook Meals with their key risk areas, prioritized from high to low risk.
Preparing for the worst with penetration testing
In tandem with the security health assessment, CDW Canada performed three penetration tests on the WeCook Meals network. Penetration testing is a form of “ethical hacking” and involves CDW Canada cybersecurity experts executing a simulated attack against an organization’s network, data and personnel to help identify vulnerabilities.
The first test was an external penetration test. This determined what cyberattackers could see from the outside looking in and what they could try and take advantage of to get inside the WeCook Meals network.
The second test was an internal network penetration test. This assumed that a breach of the external perimeter had already taken place and a bad actor is in the network. This provided the IT team with a full view into potential vulnerabilities within the network.
The third test was a penetration test on their wireless networks. This ensured that the networks were properly segmented and that someone couldn’t get in from a guest or lobby network using a phone or computer.
“CDW Canada’s penetration testing services not only shed light on where our network vulnerabilities were, they also gave us peace of mind that our customer and employee data was secure,” said Behl. “More than the testing itself, CDW Canada developed a comprehensive plan and set of suggestions for how to deal with any vulnerabilities.”
After the penetration tests, CDW Canada ran a tabletop exercise with WeCook Meals where they simulated a cyberattack to ensure everyone knows what their responsibilities would be during various scenarios.
“It’s one thing to understand where vulnerabilities lie on paper, but it’s another thing entirely to know what to do if an incident were to occur,” said Behl. “CDW Canada walked us through various scenarios, ensuring that we all knew how to execute an incident response plan, not just know it in theory.”
From services to solutions: building a relationship with WeCook Meals
After identifying vulnerabilities and building a cybersecurity roadmap, there is more on the horizon for CDW and WeCook Meals.
“The relationship with our CDW account manager has enabled us to address other IT needs besides cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities,” said Behl. “I always appreciate how quickly and professionally our account manager handles things. WeCook Meals is a small organization and we want to have everything as soon as possible to fine tune our processes and CDW Canada always delivers. For example, if I need a server next week, other providers will take two to three weeks just to provide a quote, and this is never the case with CDW Canada.”
What began with security services is now expanding into providing traditional hardware and software.
“You can build up trust by exceeding expectations and making sure that you get products to the client in a timely manner,” said Dave Waye, Cybersecurity Advisor at CDW Canada. “It's really required that there's a trust level between the IT provider, CDW Canada, and the client. For WeCook Meals we started out with security services, which helped create a solid foundation of trust and allowed everything else to flow from there.”