Sunset Grown: Protecting Data And Preserving Quality
1.2
Million acres under greenhouse glass
500
Brands under continued R&D trials
1
Cyber resilience platform
Overview
A pioneer in the greenhouse industry, Sunset Grown has been synonymous with innovation and quality for over 70 years. As the largest greenhouse grower and distributor of fresh produce in North America, Sunset Grown operates over 1.2 million acres under greenhouse glass, offering pesticide-free fruits and vegetables through sustainable practices.
Managing a complex supply chain from cultivation to distribution, they ensure fresh, high-quality produce reaches millions of consumers across the continent year-round, while continuing to innovate with over 500 brands.
Given the time-sensitive nature of its produce and the operational impact of potential disruptions, Sunset Grown looked to strengthen its existing cybersecurity posture with enhanced data security and rapid recovery capabilities with industry-leading platforms like Rubrik Security Cloud and CrowdStrike Falcon to ensure uninterrupted supply chain operations.
“Maintaining operational resilience is crucial for Sunset Grown to minimize food waste, avoid reputational damage, and ensure our consumers have a reliable supply of fresh fruits and vegetables year-round. This resilience hinges on the company's ability to rapidly recover from any disruptive cyber events while ensuring restored data hasn't been maliciously tampered with,”
Bill Lucas
Director of Cybersecurity, Sunset Grown![]()
Challenges
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Multiple backup and recovery solutions
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Legacy solutions would take up to 3 weeks to scan and assess inventory of data and assets
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Difficulty rapidly and confidently detecting threats and identifying secure data recovery points
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Lack of visibility across expanding data footprint, compounded by M&A activity
Results
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1 cyber resilience platform
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Anomaly Detection proactively scans and quickly identifies anomalous activity, minimizing impact of cyber threats and potential downtime
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Threat Hunting enables quick, trustworthy scanning for threats in minutes, accelerating recovery efforts
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Data visibility, risk mitigation and improved compliance procedures with DSPM
Challenges
Downtime Disrupts the Fresh Food Supply
For Sunset Grown, any disruption in operations can have severe consequences. Any form of downtime that delays distribution, even by just a few days, could result in entire crops being rejected by retailers for failing to meet quality standards.
"The impact of downtime can have a spiraling negative effect on us," explained Bill Lucas, Sr. Director of Cybersecurity at Sunset Grown. "In manufacturing, for example, if you miss a shipment by one day, you can just send it out later. But with fresh produce, if you ship tomatoes even a day late, we jeopardize not passing mandatory quality check controls at the retailer. It takes months, years to grow these crops, so lost product is extremely costly."
“Maintaining operational resilience is crucial for Sunset Grown to minimize food waste, avoid reputational damage, and ensure our consumers have a reliable supply of fresh fruits and vegetables year-round. This resilience hinges on the company's ability to rapidly recover from any disruptive cyber events while ensuring restored data hasn't been maliciously tampered with,” said Lucas.
"Data breaches and cyberattacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and the potential impact on our business is significant. We needed a solution that could not only help us recover quickly from any incidents but also proactively identify and mitigate risks before they could cause harm."
Bill Lucas
Director of Cybersecurity, Sunset Grown![]()
Solutions
Rubrik Provides Comprehensive Data Security
After adopting the AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon® cybersecurity platform for comprehensive threat prevention, detection, and response across endpoints, identities, and data, Sunset Grown further consolidated multiple, siloed backup and recovery solutions with Rubrik Security Cloud to enhance data security, ensure compliance, and support rapid cyber recovery. This gave the team a unified platform for data security, backup, recovery, compliance, and threat detection across their data estate.
By integrating Rubrik’s Context Enrichment App with Falcon via the CrowdStrike Marketplace, it allowed Sunset Grown’s security teams to correlate cyber threats with data security insights in real time. Working alongside the company’s existing Falcon platform — which provides advanced threat intelligence, endpoint security, and identity protection — Rubrik delivers data-centric security and recovery at speed and scale. Previously, it could take the team up to three weeks to assess data and asset inventory. Now, with Rubrik, they gain trustworthy, actionable insights within minutes. This capability has helped Sunset Grown reduce risk, increase visibility, and minimize downtime, which is critical to maintaining its fresh produce supply chain.
"With Rubrik Security Cloud, we were able to simply turn on Data Security Posture Management and instantly see how much sensitive data we had, what was stale, and who had access," stated Lucas. "That allowed us to quickly mitigate risk of data exposure and make necessary remediations."
Rubrik's comprehensive data security capabilities offer critical visibility into Sunset Grown's expanding data footprint, compounded by industry mergers and acquisitions. Rubrik’s native security feature, Sensitive Data Discovery, automates discovery and classification of sensitive data allowing for tighter data access controls and compliance fulfillment while Anomaly Detection’s continuous monitoring protects against emerging cyber threats by detecting anomalies that could indicate compromise.
"Rubrik has transformed our security posture and given us peace of mind that we're restoring to secure recovery points," said Lucas. "If an incident occurs, we can use Threat Hunting to quickly assess our backups to ensure we're recovering to a clean data state prior to an attack."
In an industry where delayed shipments can devastate entire harvests, Sunset Grown's strategic investment in Rubrik safeguards both its bottom line and reputation. By integrating data security and ensuring compliance with industry standards, Rubrik has fortified Sunset Grown's operations against the myriad challenges of the fresh produce industry. This partnership enables Sunset Grown to continue pioneering sustainable growing practices and delivering on their mission to provide fresh, greenhouse-grown produce year-round to families across North America.
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