Capita Transfers 1 Million Documents a Month with MOVEit

Capita TDS decided to replace its data transfer infrastructure with Ipswitch’s MOVEit solution, a high-end, secure managed file transfer system hosted on on-site servers.

The Challenges

Capita Total Document Solutions (TDS) scans and transfers huge volumes of data every day via a network of state of the art scanning bureaus and highly secure, government accredited storage facilities strategically placed throughout the UK.

Capita TDS realized that it faced a period of rapid business change and growth. Operations Manager Anthony Lamb needed a more robust and secure means of transferring rapidly changing volumes of data, much of which is highly confidential.

The Vision

“We are trusted by local and central government, banks and small to large commercial organizations with some of the most sensitive and valuable paper and digital material in the country,” Anthony explained. “Recently, however, we’ve started providing much more in the way of digital mailroom services. Increasingly, we’re transferring data from Capita TDS sites to our clients as an ongoing process. We’re capturing and transmitting images, data and information as often as every ten minutes. Our data transfer not only had to be secure and encrypted, but we also wanted a robust platform which was resilient, regardless of interruptions to connections or extreme peak data volumes.”

The Solution

Capita TDS decided to replace its data transfer infrastructure with Ipswitch’s MOVEit solution, a high-end, secure managed file transfer system hosted on on-site servers. An objective process led to the rapid selection and installation of this system, now set to handle peak loads of up to 150,000 documents per day and a typical turnover of a million documents a month.

“We carried out extensive research and drew upon our wide ranging experience when choosing to adopt MOVEit,” said Anthony. “Because we’re in the business of multi-client document management, and file transfer is a core aspect of that, we decided Ipswitch was the company we wanted to deal with.”

A robust solution

Capita TDS’s data transfer has to embody robust business continuity measures and to work across a variety of legacy scanning systems and document imaging suppliers, some of which are local to individual machines. Scanning is carried out locally at Capita TDS sites and sent to secure local server locations. Data is then transferred to electronic mailrooms or clients.

“Working across multiple sites presented several technical challenges that MOVEit has allowed us to address,” explained Anthony. “The solution allows us to have a fallback server, so we can still access the information and transfer data on a secondary site. MOVEit has therefore given us robust business continuity provision should anything happen on the primary site.”

Particularly important to Capita TDS’s clients is the ability to ensure that data is sent without errors or interference, and can be subjected to a digital handshake and non-repudiation measures.

“If a connection were to fail, we now have an automatic reconciliation and handshake mechanism. We know that, regardless of what we’ve sent, if it falls over it’ll pick up again and resend files as necessary. We’ve tested this capability exhaustively,” said Anthony.

Security

Capita TDS’s clients in business and government require absolute transparency with its internal processes and security levels. Different clients demand that Capita TDS adhere to various standards, including the UK government’s Code of Connection (CoCo), the Payment Cards Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and those in place for FSA regulated businesses.

“We are audited internally and externally to various standards. For the first time, the MOVEit solution enables us to work to all our clients’ security requirements from the same platform: we’re now using this as a multi-client tool for all of our clients where data transfer is involved. … With MOVEit, we can be completely transparent.”

Rapid self-sufficiency

Capita TDS was able to complete the evaluation and implementation and became completely self sufficient with MOVEit within four months – a remarkably rapid process for a top-end security product.

“We’ve made a significant saving through being able to automate processes that used to have to be checked manually. However, the focus of this project was to ensure that we maintain the highest levels of security which has now been achieved.”