Introduction
Meet Sarah, the CISO of a regional health system. Her organization just closed the acquisition of a 10-location hospital group. The board is celebrating the expansion. Sarah is looking at a spreadsheet of inherited IT assets and feeling a sense of dread. She has no idea what their security posture is. Are they patched? Are their firewalls configured correctly? Do they have rogue medical devices on the network? The CEO is asking for a unified security report for the next board meeting, but she can’t give them one because she has a massive, unquantified blind spot.
Meet David, the CIO of a successful senior living community. The board just greenlit a new memory care wing, a 25% expansion that will drive significant revenue. The project is a go. But David knows his current network is already stretched thin. The Wi-Fi is unreliable, the phone system is a separate legacy PBX, and the access control system is another silo. He knows that just adding more devices will break it. The clinical and operational growth plan is moving forward, but the infrastructure to support it doesn’t exist, and any upgrade must happen with zero disruption to the 400 residents who live there.
Sarah and David have never met, but they have the same problem. Their network has become a constraint on the organization’s strategic goals. For Sarah, it’s a risk and compliance constraint. For David, it’s an operational and growth constraint. The technology is no longer an enabler; it’s a roadblock. And in both cases, the complexity of solving the problem is beyond what their internal teams can handle alone.
The Post-Acquisition Challenge: From Blind Spot to Unified Security
Sarah’s situation is increasingly common. As healthcare organizations grow through acquisition, they inherit a patchwork of disparate IT environments. This was the exact challenge facing a major Northeast healthcare provider network after acquiring more than 10 hospitals and physician practices. They had no consistent security policy enforcement, no unified network segmentation, and no centralized visibility. The board was demanding weekly progress reports on the first-ever joint IT initiative across all facilities.
Derive was brought in to bring structure to the decision-making process and to design and implement a unified solution across the enterprise. Using Cisco Firepower Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) and Cisco Secure Endpoint (formerly AMP for Endpoints), we established consistent policy enforcement, full visibility into data flows, and proactive threat detection across all campuses. The result: an organized, reliable, audit-ready security posture that minimized risk to both the organization and its patients.
The Pre-Expansion Challenge: From Constraint to Enabler
David’s challenge is one of proactive growth. This was the situation at Applewood, an award-winning continuing care retirement community in New Jersey. As they began a large capital improvement project to expand amenities and care, it became clear their legacy systems couldn’t keep up. They needed to modernize their network, unify their communications, and expand Wi-Fi for residents, all with zero disruption to clinical and residential services.
They chose Derive Technologies to manage the entire project, from multi-vendor coordination to a staged, seamless deployment. The result: a 40% reduction in infrastructure management time, a fully redundant and secure network, and the capacity to expand their memory care facility, enabling a projected 25% revenue growth.
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The Common Thread: The Partner Who Absorbs the Complexity
In both of these high-stakes situations, the solution wasn’t just technology. It was a partner who could absorb the complexity of the environment and execute flawlessly. Our 5,000 sq. ft. staging and testing facility in Manhattan allowed us to pre-build and validate the entire Applewood solution before it ever went live, ensuring zero downtime. Our deep expertise in multi-vendor coordination meant we could manage the entire ecosystem of technology partners, IT staff, and suppliers. And our 25 years of experience in mission-critical environments, backed by Cisco Partner designations across Networking,
Security, Services, and Cloud and AI Infrastructure, gave both organizations the confidence that the project would be done right.
The Takeaway for IT Buyers
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