DPC Technology

Dental offices are busy places. Computers sit everywhere, from the front desk to the operatory, and people don’t have much time to slow down and think about security. That’s why DPC Technology has worked to make protection part of the job, rather than something clients only think about after a problem pops up.

Founded in 1995, DPC Technology built their business around supporting dental practices. CEO Clay Archer grew up around dentistry, and that familiarity shaped the company from the start. DPC understands how dental offices operate, what sets them apart from other businesses, and where small problems tend to escalate into costly ones. That’s why Archer can confidently say, “It’s not so much of a fair fight when we go in to compete against somebody.”

Challenge | Too many machines and not enough visibility

As DPC moved from break-fix work into managed services, they needed a security model that could hold up across a growing client base. That was especially important in dentistry, where one office can have far more devices than people. Archer says a typical practice may have roughly 1.5 to 1.75 times as many endpoints as humans, which means there are many machines to keep track of and many opportunities for something to fall out of view.

This also raises the chances of problems on the user side. “People are just clickers,” says Archer. Before better protections were in place, he explains, dentists were getting hit with ransomware “like crazy.” Therefore, DPC needed a way to reduce that exposure without turning security into a separate debate every time a tool changed.

Additionally, Microsoft Defender Antivirus was built into DPC’s clients’ environments. Archer notes that while Defender itself is strong, the problem was that, before Huntress, there was no practical way for DPC to manage it across thousands of machines. If Defender was turned off, if a firewall was disabled, or if something suspicious happened on a device, it didn’t reliably report back in a way the team could act on. DPC didn’t need a different antivirus as much as it needed greater visibility and control.

Solution | Turning Defender into a managed security layer

Everything changed when Huntress Managed Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) integrated control of Microsoft Defender, making the decision to partner with Huntress an easy one for Archer. This integration allowed DPC to keep Defender while gaining centralized visibility into what was happening across their endpoints. Instead of each machine handling its own protection in isolation, Huntress provided a unified dashboard that alerted the team to any changes and allowed them to intervene. “Now, instead of just reporting to itself, it’s reporting back to Huntress, which reports back to us, and we can fix that,” Archer said.

That also mattered financially. Before Huntress, DPC was paying for separate AV because using Defender at scale without centralized management wasn’t realistic. Huntress changed the equation. Archer says Huntress “killed two birds with one stone” because DPC could move away from older AV tooling and gain the visibility it had been missing. In his words, “Huntress made all the pieces fit together.”

It wasn’t long before DPC made Huntress part of their standard stack. Endpoint protection became a baseline service. Managed Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) followed as email and identity problems became more common. Managed Security Awareness Training (SAT) gave end users a starting point for security awareness. More recently, DPC added Managed Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) to consolidate more of their security data into a single environment. Archer says the value was in having those signals working together instead of sitting in separate places.

The support behind the platform was also a key factor. Archer recalls being impressed when he saw Huntress helping others manage security incidents, noting “the team of actual humans” and the detailed insights they provided afterward. Huntress provided DPC with a human-led Security Operations Center (SOC), a 24/7 team of elite, AI-backed threat analysts ready to investigate and remediate threats whenever needed.

Results | A security standard DPC could scale

For DPC, the clearest result was consistency. They were able to roll Huntress out broadly and make it part of the service clients received by default. That meant DPC no longer had to make the case office by office. Protection was simply there.

The rollout itself didn’t create the usual headaches. Archer contrasts Huntress with tools that take months to implement and still struggle to get adopted internally. With Huntress, he says, “There was none of that. It was just really easy.” He also says his staff picked it up without complaint, which gave DPC a security layer it could operationalize, rather than another platform that looked good on paper but created drag in practice.

DPC also gained visibility that they didn’t have before. Instead of relying on Defender to sit quietly on thousands of machines, the team could actually see when something was wrong and respond. That became especially useful in acquisition scenarios. Archer explains that when Huntress is rolled out into newly acquired environments, it starts finding issues right away because “there’s always something stuck in a corner somewhere that you don’t know about.”

It’s important to note that DPC Technology didn’t choose Huntress simply because it paired with Defender. They chose Huntress because Defender was already important to the business, and Huntress made it usable at the scale DPC needed. The company wanted a way to standardize protection across a dense, device-heavy client base, without forcing a painful migration or buying separate layers just to get basic visibility. Huntress gave DPC that visibility, helped it make protection standard, and backed the platform with real experts when something needed attention. That’s what made Huntress the right fit.