Industry: Insurance
For one global insurance company, having file transfer processes that work is nonnegotiable. Between needing to share data with the company’s national office, running a collaboration with a car rental company, and catering to over a million customers, they needed their file transfers to run smoothly and securely—but the legacy systems they had in place pre-2018 were frustrating, to say the least.
One of the company’s applications engineers couldn’t believe the file transfer processes they had to deal with before switching to managed file transfer software.
"We had a server where a bunch of batch scripts ran and transferred files to vendors," he said. "We wrote manual scripts—50 or 60 of them—that all ran from Task Scheduler." Because their setup lacked security and encryption features, critical information wasn’t always protected during batch transfers. Their setup didn’t have alerting or reporting abilities either. It quickly became clear that better cybersecurity strategies were needed to protect their file transfers.
The engineer’s team also wanted to cluster their systems, so the bank files they exchanged wouldn’t be interrupted by system failure or downtime. But making Task Scheduler cluster aware required knowledge of PowerShell. "It was this huge long convoluted process," he said. "And with security in mind, we had to implement a DMZ secure gateway server to go along with a new file transfer server. Jobs would have to be scheduled on two different sets of task schedulers."
The design files they created to make clustering work were crazy. There had to be an easier way.
Back to the Basics
For this insurance company, it was time to unravel their processes and systems and go back to the basics that mattered: encryption, automation, alerting, and reporting. If they could find a solution that did all these things simply and efficiently, that would be a win.
And win they did. After evaluating several managed file transfer (MFT) solutions, the engineer tried GoAnywhere MFT, a robust cybersecurity solution from HelpSystems.
The engineer and his team discovered many benefits during the trial stage:
- Ease of Use: GoAnywhere was powerful but not overly technical. The software was a breeze to install and easy to use.
- Focused on What Matters: The team was pleased to see GoAnywhere support extra functionality, like user-to-user collaboration, but even more pleased to find that GoAnywhere never lost sight of their bread-and-butter requirements: automation, auditing, and secure file transfers.
- Out-of-the-Box Project Designers: GoAnywhere included a drag-and-drop project designer for workflows and automation. This eliminated the need for scripting and programming.
- Affordability: Finally, the cost beat out the competition. GoAnywhere offered the insurance company a positive ROI that they could achieve quickly and efficiently with less of a learning curve—while still boasting all the features and functionality of other comparable solutions.
Managed File Transfer: A Fresh Start
Once GoAnywhere was fully implemented, the global insurance company couldn’t imagine life without it. They meet requirements and complete key projects via several of GoAnywhere’s features:
PCI DSS Compliance
The insurance company is PCI DSS certified. To ensure their member information is protected as much as possible, they are required to go above and beyond PCI DSS requirements to ensure their file transfers are compliant. GoAnywhere MFT supports PCI DSS compliance efforts through encryption, secure, industry-standard file transfer protocols, access controls for sensitive data, and detailed logging/reporting.
→ Get the Guide: What's New in the PCI Data Security Standard ←
Cloud Integrations
After implementing GoAnywhere, the insurance company installed GoAnywhere’s Google Cloud Storage Connector. This cloud integration allows them to pull data from the cloud from two vendors they’ve partnered with.
On a monthly basis, they take a file they’ve generated in-house and transfers it to a Google storage bucket. Once the files are in the bucket, two of their vendors apply logic to the data for marketing purposes. The file finishes processing using the Google compute engine before GoAnywhere pulls the file back into the company’s enterprise data warehouse (EDW) system.
Another GoAnywhere integration this company uses is for Amazon AWS. This integration fulfills an important project in their environment. "We’ve used [the Amazon AWS integration] since day one," explained the company’s engineer. "It was one of the selling features for us."
Improved Visibility & Centralization
Before GoAnywhere came into the picture, the engineer and a co-worker relied on Task Scheduler and batch file transfers to send and retrieve sensitive data. Their legacy setup did not have alerting, notifications, or reporting functionality, so they’d spend precious time tracking down issues or digging into different data sources to regain some visibility. This lack of clarity was a source of frustration.
A big selling point for this insurance company was GoAnywhere’s ability to provide visibility into all areas of their file transfer processes, including the data movement happening on-premises, within their cloud environment, and to their web applications. Not only does this visibility help the engineer’s team know when and where files are sent, it gives them flexibility to train new employees if needed.
"Say I need more help and we’re hiring someone else," he explained. "I can say [to that new hire,] ‘Everything’s in GoAnywhere. All our jobs, anything that’s incoming, all the users. You can see who has access, you can see the agents we have deployed and what they’re doing.’ Having that [data] in a central place is just so much easier than what we’ve used in the past."
Remote MFT Agents
GoAnywhere’s MFT Agents module allows admins to remotely control automated file transfers and file processing from a central GoAnywhere server. With MFT agents in place, this insurance company has improved its overall security posture. They are able to move sensitive files between restricted servers without having to rely on insecure methods or window transfers. All of these transfers are automated, secured, and can be audited.
→ How else are organizations using MFT? Explore 20+ use cases in this free ebook ←
Setting up for Success
Overall, this global insurance company is set for success with their new managed file transfer solution. Instead of copying and piecing together scripts to send new file transfers (a process that took 30-60 minutes per script before), GoAnywhere can create a job in under five minutes. The team has utilized several areas of the software in a short amount of time and have exciting use cases to work toward.
"I love that I’m not on a batch file trying to deduce what’s going on," the engineer said of his favorite thing about GoAnywhere. "I can just visually see something and say ‘oh, this is what it needs.’ I can just set up a job and my coworker knows about it because now we get an email notification if it fails... Compared to what we had before, [our file transfer process] is where we need it to be."
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