Farmalink Helps Deliver a Healthy Future for Argentina

Pharmaceutical supply chains are crucial, often determining life-saving outcomes. An efficient supply chain ensures the accurate and timely delivery of drugs to patients and supports the economy by helping manufacturers, governments, and insurance firms reduce waste and manage healthcare spending. Farmalink enhances this process with its team of field experts and cutting-edge data center, adhering to local and international security standards. This allows Farmalink to anticipate business changes and provide innovative tools for administration, control, value chain integration, and decision-making, all backed by strong quality policies and professional ethics.

This is where Farmalink plays a pivotal role. The Argentinian based company specializes in information technology solutions that enable supply chain participants to collaborate and manage their operations more effectively. It’s a huge responsibility as Walter Vaquero, CISO at Farmalink, acknowledges. “Our success is founded on an ability to innovate using advanced and sometimes complex technologies without compromising the availability of systems that have a direct impact on healthcare delivery.”

A good example is Farmalink’s strategic migration to a multicloud environment that includes Oracle Cloud and AWS. "By transitioning to a mixed on-premises and cloud infrastructure, we can build in greater redundancy across multiple data centers for our customers,” says Vaquero.

Security is another top priority. A data breach or security vulnerability could have severe consequences for both Farmalink and its customers, so protecting the personal data of users who access medical records and prescriptions is paramount.

The business must also adapt to growing demand from organizations who want to streamline operations and reduce cost. More recently, Farmalink was selected to process and validate performance data at the public health insurance agency (PAMI), managed by Argentina's Ministry of Health. This project involves a substantial increase in data transactions with the objective of optimizing the pharmaceutical supply chain and introducing a more sophisticated information system for healthcare decision-making.

Given the complexity of its infrastructure, Farmalink turned to its long-time technology partner, F5, which for several years provided solutions that enabled Farmalink to scale, secure, and significantly improve the performance and reliability of its DNS operations. Initially, the F5 team proposed migrating these instances across different environments and cloud platforms, but this evolved into a broader discussion about API protection and how to centralize observability and management via a single console.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services emerged as the ideal solution. Valquez and his team were initially drawn to the platform’s extensibility into their datacenter and cloud environments with lightweight deployable software (CEs) that can operate in any environment while centralizing network traffic control and securing routing between local components.

Since then, Farmalink deployed F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect to reduce complexity and enforce consistent application security policies across its clouds, on-premises, and edge sites. F5 Distributed Cloud Web App Firewall provides robust protection against many of the common threats targeting their web properties. F5 Distributed Cloud API Security enables Farmalink to automatically discover API endpoints, allow legitimate transactions, and monitor for anomalous behavior.

"F5 Distributed Cloud Services goes way beyond DNS," says Vaquero. "In addition to WAF and API protection, we also benefit from a single console for observability and management across our entire environment."

Consolidating Farmalink's infrastructure on F5 Distributed Cloud Services greatly accelerated the deployment of new services. By integrating various platforms—on-premises, cloud, and edge—operations are streamlined, enabling a "build once, deploy many times" rather than addressing each environment separately.

"Initially, our cloud adoption was primarily driven by security concerns. However, we quickly discovered the benefits of scaling our services,” says Vaquero. “As a result, we're actively migrating all our environments to the cloud."

Migrating to a multicloud environment is one thing. Being able to extract maximum scalability, security, and value from a diverse infrastructure is another. This is where F5 Distributed Cloud Services shines. Farmalink now has the flexibility to retain appropriate applications on-premises, take advantage of its main Oracle Cloud environment, and acquire businesses with an incumbent cloud provider, as demonstrated by its recent acquisition of DigiDoc, which operates on AWS.

"With F5, we can fully leverage the cloud for faster application redeployment, streamlined environment creation, and efficient environment copying," says Vaquero.

With the PAMI project, Farmalink anticipates a tenfold growth in data transaction volume, from 1.5 million to 15 million transactions. However, with deployable software extensibility of the F5 Distributed Cloud Platform, Farmalink can provision services locally, closer to the app with faster response times.

"The ability to adapt and scale our infrastructure to new locations in a matter of hours instead of weeks is a critical factor for us," says Vaquero. "With F5 Distributed Cloud Services, we can accommodate new projects without compromising our high security and availability standards."

F5 Distributed Cloud Services unlocks the power of multicloud for Farmalink. It provides the flexibility of a diverse environment without the complexity of managing each cloud individually. By streamlining multicloud administration, Farmalink also avoids the need for expensive migrations or specialized cloud expertise. Centralized control enables its existing team to efficiently manage everything and scale rapidly, ultimately driving increased profits and reduced costs.

Vaquero also praises the F5 team that helped navigate the deployment of F5 Distributed Cloud Services. "Beyond the technical capabilities of the solution, a key factor in our decision was the ongoing support from the local F5 team," says Vaquero. "They consistently demonstrated a deep understanding of our specific needs and provided tailored solutions. Their proactive approach and ability to anticipate our requirements were invaluable."

Vaquero offers advice to other healthcare organizations: "Healthcare is a prime target for cyberattacks. Information security must be a top priority. I strongly recommend considering multicloud application security services coupled with robust technology assurances such as F5. This approach can significantly enhance resilience and ensure uninterrupted services.”

When asked, Vaquero sums up F5 Distributed Cloud Services in three words: stability, security, and availability. This gives him the confidence to expand the existing deployment, add more WAF and app security components, and seek greater integration with Farmalink's SIEM.

"The rapid pace of technological advancements requires us to regularly update our environments and infrastructure. This constant evolution presents significant security challenges, particularly as we transition from traditional on-premises setups to distributed cloud environments. F5 plays a crucial role in helping us address these challenges and maintain a robust security posture," he concludes.