Enterasys is the Network Infrastructure and Security Division of Siemens Enterprise Communications GmbH &Co KG, a leading provider of switching, routing and security products.
With thousands of customers, partners and employees working together in more than 80 countries worldwide, Enterasys wanted to find a secure and reliable way to transfer, manage and monitor sensitive information – quickly and reliably.
“Basic FTP just isn’t good enough for our customers,” said Grant Cocco, CISSP®, systems administrator at Enterasys and member of the company’s internal Security Council. “FTP has been popular for years because it is easy and efficient. However, we decided FTP was not secure enough to protect our customers’ file transfers. We wanted a system to protect customer confidentiality and give us a level of visibility to know exactly what information is being sent, to whom, and when.”
The Enterasys mantra is “There is nothing more important than our customers.” As a visionary in the networking and security space, Enterasys has always been committed to protecting valuable customer data. Moving from basic FTP to secure file transfers is another example of how Enterasys makes customer needs top priority.
Enterasys customers are in a variety of business sectors, including education, healthcare, government, financial services and manufacturing. As a supplier of solutions to these customers who are affected by regulations such as SOX, HIPAA and PCI, Enterasys takes extra precautions to protect data – both stored data and data in transit.
Enterasys needed a managed file transfer solution that could:
Enterasys chose Ipswitch’s MOVEit product portfolio, which includes:
In a matter of months, Enterasys had more than 600 users on the MOVEit File Transfer server.
“With other file transfer approaches, you often maintain a separate database of user accounts and passwords,” said Cocco. “If we had to create and manage hundreds if not thousands of accounts manually, it would be an administrative nightmare. With MOVEit File Transfer we simply authenticate people against existing user repositories and people are granted access to specific documents based on rights that we control.”
Regardless of the number of files being sent at any given time, MOVEit File Transfer provides Enterasys with a complete audit trail of information sent and received. MOVEit File Transfer and MOVEit Central have built in reporting modules, including dashboards, which makes it easy to keep track of where data is going. Strong reporting capabilities combined with tamper-evident logging provides organizations like Enterasys with the ability to trace possible abuse and satisfy audit concerns.
With MOVEit File Transfer, Enterasys professionals can quickly, easily and securely download the files they need, anytime, anywhere, from any Web browser.
“MOVEit File Transfer is a versatile file transfer application,” said Michael Lam, director for solutions engineering at Enterasys. “It has a user-friendly Web-browser interface, a simple folder/directory structure with permission levels, reporting and redundancy capabilities. It’s quick, easy to use and secure. We host large files that our partners and employees need to access. This application provides them the flexibility to securely get at the files without the need to VPN into our corporate environment. All they need is an Internet connection and a Web browser.”
Since implementing MOVEit File Transfer, Enterasys has gained:
“Originally, we saw MOVEit File Transfer as a tactical approach to securely transfer large files,” said Cocco. “But in a very short time, we realized the power of the solution, giving us greater control, visibility and management of all internal and external file transfers. We took a good, hard look at several of the other managed file transfer solutions available. Only MOVEit could do everything we needed.”
When asked what deciding factors prompted the selection of MOVEit products over competitive solutions, Cocco said: “In addition to the core requirements to ensure data confidentiality, integrity and availability, what impressed us was the level of service we receive every time we contact the support department. There are never long periods of time wasted waiting on hold. When we call into the support department we get connected quickly to a competent support professional that helps us pinpoint and resolve our issue.”
Enterasys has migrated old scripts that automate file transfers to MOVEit Central. With MOVEit Central, you can quickly create tasks that replace older scripting languages. Automated file transfers occur daily in many departments. MOVEit Central has an easy-to-use management interface that allows administrators to quickly schedule new workflows and monitor many tasks simultaneously. MOVEit Central comes with strong monitoring, alerting and reporting capabilities out-of-the-box.
The company’s IT department is considering expanding the use of MOVEit File Transfer by adding redundancy and additional reliability to the Secure FTP Web front end. This will help with overall management of file transfer traffic as user adoption grows.
“It’s the little things that make a difference,” said Cocco. “For example, if an unauthorized person tries to gain access to our Secure FTP service, MOVEit File Transfer automatically locks them out after a set number of failed attempts to log on. Authentication failure alerts are sent to administrators that IP addresses have been locked out. We check the log files to see if the failure alerts are legitimate users mistyping their password or unauthorized access attempts.”
MOVEit File Transfer makes it easy for Enterasys to keep customers satisfied by:
“Anyone who is serious about protecting sensitive data sent between organizations needs to be using products that are the same caliber as Ipswitch’s MOVEit File Transfer and MOVEit Central,” said Cocco. “The team at Ipswitch sets the bar when it comes to secure managed file transfer excellence.”