Within days, Vetcor and Expel scaled security across 900+ vet practices

A veterinarian in suburban Chicago spent eight years building her practice. She knew how to diagnose heart murmurs in golden retrievers and perform emergency surgery on cats hit by cars. What she didn’t know—and frankly, didn’t want to learn—was how to configure firewalls, manage employee passwords, or respond to cybersecurity alerts at 2 AM.

“You didn’t go to veterinary school so that you could do HR and finance and legal,” says Andrew Wilder, Chief Security Officer at Vetcor, the veterinary consolidator that acquired her practice in 2023. “Vetcor’s job is to take on those responsibilities so doctors can focus on providing excellent patient care.”

It’s a simple value proposition that has made Vetcor one of the fastest-growing companies in veterinary services, supporting over 900 practices across the US and Canada. Joining Vector means hospitals will thrive with their own local culture and medical autonomy, while benefiting from a robust support model. But beyond the exam room lies a complex cybersecurity challenge that would make most CSOs break out in a cold sweat.

When Wilder joined Vetcor, he inherited a complex security challenge that would be familiar to anyone managing distributed operations. Nearly a thousand separate locations. Limited on-site IT support. Critical data ranging from pet X-rays to customer information. And a regulatory environment that requires protecting animal health records under state laws for years.

The challenge wasn’t just scale—it was the sheer diversity of Vetcor’s hospitals. Each veterinary clinic is unique and comes into the Vetcor network with its own systems and data security practices.

Previous leadership had used traditional managed security services, but the quotes for continued investment were staggering. For a company built on operational efficiency, those numbers didn’t compute.

“It’s like we have video cameras at all of our sites, but no one’s looking at the feeds,” Wilder recalls his predecessor’s general counsel saying. “That’s exactly what we had. We had security tools, but were not able to react fast enough to the alerts they were generating.”

Rather than rely on vendor sales pitches, Wilder turned to his CISO network. The feedback was unanimous: three companies consistently got mentioned, and their pricing was up to five times less than the traditional MSSPs.

“I leaned on people I trust, other CISOs who’ve worked in complex, distributed environments like ours,” Wilder says. “I needed to hear what was actually working, not just what sounded good in a sales deck.”

Among those three companies, Expel stood out for a critical reason: they could work without requiring Vetcor to deploy agents across nearly a thousand locations. For a company with limited on-site IT support, that wasn’t just convenient—it was essential.

“If we have to deploy hardware, we’re talking about putting boots on the ground a thousand times,” Wilder explains. “That’s gonna cost more than the cost of the service just to do deployment.”

Expel’s API-first architecture made the difference. Rather than requiring complex on-site installations or agent deployments, Expel could connect directly to Vetcor’s existing security tools and infrastructure through secure APIs. The onboarding process validated this approach—within the first day, Expel’s SOC analysts had full visibility across Vetcor’s distributed environment and were already generating actionable alerts.

“The Expel onboarding itself was quite easy to do, and we had great technical help,” Wilder recalls. “Within the first day or so we started to get alerts for things that they were seeing.”

This agentless approach meant Vetcor could achieve comprehensive security coverage across all 900+ locations within days, not months—and crucially, without a single technician visiting a veterinary clinic.

While most security leaders debate which SIEM to buy, Wilder was asking a different question: do we need one at all?

“I think the SIEM is kind of going away,” he says. “I think we’re going to the idea that we’re going to put all of our stuff into a data lake and correlate things through there using a standard security mesh that’s on top of the data lake.”

It’s a contrarian view that’s gaining traction among forward-thinking CISOs, but it requires the right partner. Expel’s API-first architecture could ingest telemetry from Vetcor’s existing security tools without requiring a traditional SIEM in the middle.

“Public storage is significantly cheaper than storage in a SIEM,” Wilder points out. “And then I can just build my own agent to go on top of that to say, find all of this stuff for me in the data lake. Because AI is perfect for that—that’s one of the best things it does, analyzing large amounts of data.”

The approach let Wilder save his company millions while positioning Vetcor for the future of security operations.

The results speak for themselves. In their most recent quarterly business review, Expel reported looking at 8 million security events and distilling them down to 400 investigations—which ultimately bubbled up to just 40 incidents requiring Vetcor’s attention.

“That’s exactly the kind of signal reduction we needed to run lean and still feel in control,” Wilder says.

The partnership freed up Wilder’s security operations to focus on high-value activities like vulnerability management and threat intelligence—work that adds strategic value rather than just keeping the lights on.

“We used to be buried in alerts,” Wilder notes. “Now we’re spending time on the things that matter, and our veterinary teams can focus on what they are here for: taking care of animals.”

Vetcor continues to grow—they’ve grown 100+ locations since Wilder joined—and each new practice validates his lean security model. The company can rapidly onboard new practices without deploying security staff or complex infrastructure.

“We haven’t had any major incidents since we’ve been on Expel,” Wilder says. “In cybersecurity, our number one thing is don’t break stuff. If anything breaks, then we’re in trouble.”

For other security leaders managing distributed environments, Wilder’s advice is pragmatic: “Find a partner that helps shift the low-value work off your team. Push what you can to AI and automation, which Expel is already doing, and let your people focus on what really protects the business.”

It’s a philosophy that mirrors Vetcor’s core business model: let the experts handle the operational complexity so the professionals can focus on what they do best. For veterinarians, that’s caring for animals. For security teams, it’s strategic protection rather than alert triage.

“People talk a lot today about this agentic AI shift,” Wilder reflects. “What we’re going to see, at least in the near term, is this value shift in resources. Maybe in the future I’m going to be doing threat hunting, or intelligence, or other things that are gonna add more value to my organization than just those mundane, repetitive tasks.”

In a world where cybersecurity often feels like an arms race of complexity and cost, Vetcor’s approach offers a different path: strategic simplicity that scales, protects what matters, and lets everyone focus on their actual job.

“There are very few individual veterinary practices that are able to do anything in cybersecurity,” Wilder explains. “We’re able to do it quite well.”

For the veterinarian in Chicago, that means she can spend her day doing what she loves—helping sick animals get better—while knowing her practice is protected by enterprise-grade security. And for Andrew Wilder, it means he built a cybersecurity program that not only works today but is ready for whatever comes next.

Key benefits of Vetcor’s partnership with Expel

• Massive signal reduction: Reduced 8 million security events to just 40 actionable incidents per quarter requiring internal team attention
• Cost savings: Avoided millions in annual MSSP costs while achieving superior security outcomes
• Agentless deployment: Enabled rapid onboarding of 900+ distributed locations without on-site IT support or physical deployment costs
• Strategic team focus: Freed security operations lead to work on high-value activities like security awareness, threat intelligence, and vulnerability management
• Future-ready architecture: Positioned for data lake strategy and AI-powered analytics without vendor lock-in

Vetcor provides comprehensive business services to over 900 veterinary practices across North America, handling everything from HR and finance to IT and cybersecurity so veterinarians can focus on patient care. Founded in 1997, the company continues to grow through strategic partnerships while maintaining its community-centric approach to veterinary services.