Industry: Insurance
As a commercial and personal insurance company Fortegra is in the business of managing and controlling risk and the potential loss that can occur. Fortegra provides specialty insurance protection in North America, as well as in Europe, with more than 50 insurance and warranty solution products offered. They have been in business since the late 1970s and have grown to become the second-largest credit insurer in the United States.
Credit insurers, like Fortegra, are constantly exchanging sensitive financial files with banks and other institutions, requiring strict compliance with industry regulations to protect files at rest and in motion. Prior to implementing MFT, the company was using a legacy system, requiring a high level of IT know-how, making file transfers more cumbersome than necessary. Plus, a variety of applications were needed to accomplish what managed file transfer can handle with one comprehensive system – security, automation, auditing and reporting and more.
Jon Baker, Financial Systems Manager, Fortegra, helps manage a different type of risk – the risks involved with transferring files within the organization itself, with the help of GoAnywhere MFT. As an organization, they complete an average of 30,000 jobs or file transfers a week, so this is no small task.
“We depend on GoAnywhere because with one managed file transfer product we get the automation, logging, and reporting, as well as file encryption that we need,” noted Baker. Pulling all the financial data from disparate systems and bringing them together within the company’s financial data realm is easier with managed file transfer. “Dealing with banks and communicating such data through GoAnywhere is easy, as I can schedule jobs, set workflows (where a transfer project can be set up with unlimited tasks, either through a template or customized), and create automation of the process. The software talks to our various systems and pulls everything in together,” added Baker.
Compliance Needs Are Easily Met with GoAnywhere
As an organization in a highly regulated industry, Fortegra needs to satisfy compliance stipulations such as security of private data, as required by Sarbanes-Oxley 404 and 409, as well as ensure such data remains safe both at rest and in transit, as mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act. With GoAnywhere, the required audit logs and reports are managed automatically, ensuring all file movement and actions are recorded appropriately.
GoAnywhere’s encryption protocols, including SFTP, which Fortegra and its trading partners require, is critical as the industry cannot use the more basic FTP for file transfer security due to the many financial transactions and requirements of bank trading partners. The FTP protocol does not encrypt passwords and the transfer itself is not secure when using FTP.
Baker appreciates that GoAnywhere is easy to work with. “Teaching people how to build projects and workflows is logical and requires only a very basic understanding of how logic works and what it can accomplish,” he noted. “You don’t need a lot of technical knowledge to be very successful with a project, just use the tools within GoAnywhere and the way the software was built. It’s easy without needing technical know-how. The templates are also a huge help and I use them often, rather than recreating the wheel,” Baker noted. GoAnywhere is designed with a user-friendly, dashboard-style interface so users can get started building projects in just a few hours.
“Where else do you get the complete process, from SFTP, to encryption, to ETL-type processes built in to help address working with the data once it’s received?” added Baker. “When you add in GoAnywhere’s email feature, it is just a really good package. I’m a huge advocate of GoAnywhere, and this isn’t even my main role. It is just so convenient to be able to manipulate data this way throughout the organization. I don’t know what I would do without it,” added Baker.
Baker appreciates that in the past, when a project was not initiated with GoAnywhere it would be offloaded to the operations department, adding more than a week to the project timeline due to PGP keys needing to be exchanged, among other security concerns. “From beginning to end we cut out a lot of time just using the project workflows with GoAnywhere and being able to do the entire process on our own,” he added.
Managing file transfer risks helps Fortegra get on with the business of addressing customer needs for insurance products that protect health, life, home, auto and business.
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