Prairie’s Edge Casino Resort Strengthens Cyber Resilience Without Disrupting Operations

The Customer: Prairie's Edge Casino Resort

Prairie’s Edge Casino Resort is a casino entertainment complex owned and operated by the Upper Sioux Community and located in Granite Falls, Minnesota. The resort encompasses approximately 63,000 square feet and features over 1,000 slot machines along with a variety of table games.

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How Does a Large Casino Entertainment Complex Gain Visibility Without Disrupting Operations?

Prairie’s Edge Casino Resort supports a high-availability environment where reliable network operations are critical to daily business operations. As they began to expand and modernize their environment, they needed deeper visibility into how end-user workstations were communicating with critical services and applications. Their main challenge was understanding which systems were required to communicate with one another so that appropriate trust relationships and access controls could be established without disrupting operations.

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Prior to deploying Nozomi Networks, the Prairie’s Edge Casino Resort team relied on manual, time-consuming efforts. Although they had a competitor's solution in place, it lacked some of the key features they needed. Therefore, they depended on an internal knowledge base supplemented by free network monitoring tools such as Wireshark and packet capture (PCAP). While these tools provided point-in-time insights, they required manual analysis and could not deliver on the level of visibility, alerting, or centralized intelligence that Prairie’s Edge Casino Resort needed across their environment.

Moving Beyond Legacy Monitoring to Actionable Asset Insight

To fill in the missing feature gaps from the competitor’s solution and save them hours of manual analysis every week, the Prairie’s Edge Casino Resort team began evaluating solutions. They searched for a platform that would provide the level of visibility necessary to meet regulatory expectations and prevent downtime and security issues that would greatly impact their casino operations.

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“We partnered with Impres and CSOI, and they recommended using Nozomi Networks,” explained Matt Fenger, IT Security Specialist, Prairie’s Edge Casino Resort. “We saw a demo of the Nozomi Platform and found it really cool.”

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The combination of passive network monitoring, deep asset intelligence, and built‑in vulnerability visibility stood out when evaluating the Nozomi Platform. Unlike their previous solution, Nozomi Networks enabled Prairie’s Edge Casino Resort to query not only which systems were communicating, but also detailed asset context—including installed software, known vulnerabilities, and missing hotfixes. This level of insight helped the team better understand risk across their environment without introducing operational disruption.

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“We already had a competitor’s solution in place, but when we saw the Nozomi Platform, there were a lot more features available. We’re now decommissioning the other solution and just using Nozomi,” said Fenger.

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Prairie’s Edge Casino Resort deployed Nozomi Guardian to support base network monitoring and security, along with Smart Polling, Threat Intelligence, and Asset Intelligence. This provides Prairie’s Edge Casino Resort with a single platform to consolidate asset discovery, network traffic analysis, and vulnerability awareness—reducing tool sprawl while increasing situational awareness for their team.

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From an industry perspective, organizations in regulated, high-uptime environments such as gaming and hospitality often rely on passive monitoring approaches like this to gain security insight without interrupting revenue-generating systems. Nozomi Networks’ approach aligns well with these requirements by prioritizing visibility and resilience.

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Achieving Security and Resilience in a High‑Availability Casino Environment

Since deploying Nozomi Networks, Prairie’s Edge Casino Resort has strengthened its cyber resilience by gaining deeper insight into its environment, improving security controls, and developing a clearer understanding of asset relationships and network dependencies. This enhanced awareness enables the team to reduce risk while continuing to support always‑on, revenue‑generating operations.

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“Nozomi has helped us identify what computers need to talk to what servers. In doing so, we’ve set up trust between those computers and servers,” said Fenger. “If someone else plugged into the network, they wouldn’t be able to get into that server—even if it’s on the same VLAN.”

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By defining these trusted communication paths, Prairie’s Edge Casino Resort has implemented segmentation policies that limit unnecessary access and reduce the potential impact of a security incident. These controls help contain risk and support operational continuity without affecting system availability.

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In addition to improved segmentation and access control, Prairie’s Edge Casino Resort benefits from automated vulnerability alerts combined with asset intelligence. This ongoing visibility into software, vulnerabilities, and missing hotfixes helps the team better understand and prioritize risk, supporting a more proactive and resilient security posture over time.

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“The Nozomi Networks team has been great” says Fenger. “We’ve been able to take a lot of valuable training and haven’t needed to open any support cases so far” he explains.

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Overall, the Nozomi Platform enables Prairie’s Edge Casino Resort to operate with greater cyber resilience—reducing risk, maintaining uptime, and responding more confidently to evolving threats.

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