The City of Guelph Secures Employee File Transfers with MOVEit

Guelph uses MOVEit Secure Email Attachments to send large files securely and reduce the burden on their email systems.

The Challenge

Guelph is a mid-sized city in southwestern Ontario which consistently ranks among Canada’s best places to live. With 2,000 employees serving Guelph’s citizens from City Hall and 40 satellite offices that provide police, fire, emergency medical, public works, transit, permitting, and other services. Safeguarding confidential information is of paramount importance, and Guelph must adhere to both Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (MFIPPA) and Personal Health Information Privacy Act (PHIPA) requirements.

Since 2007, Guelph has been using WS_FTP® Server for both confidential and non-confidential transfers of files such as contracts, workplace safety documents, staff information, employment information, and citizen data.

But the number of employees who needed to transfer these confidential files on an occasional basis was growing. As a result, many staff members were using consumer-oriented, non-secure file transfer sites for file exchange. This made it impossible for IT to keep track of what files were being transferred, who was transferring them, and where they were being sent. In turn, this made it impossible to fully comply with MFIPPA and PHIPA requirements, putting the City of Guelph at risk.

Also, many staff members were using city email to send files. This enabled IT to get their arms around file transfer, but presented problems of its own. The City of Guelph allowed users to send heavy attachments – files of up to 20 megabytes. While this made it convenient for those working with large files, such as engineering and building people using CAD files, users were often parking these files in their email storage, putting a real drain on email servers.

With its long and successful use of Ipswitch File Transfer WS_FTP Server, when it came to securing its growing number of ad hoc file transfers MOVEit Secure Email Attachments was a natural choice for the City of Guelph. “While our preference was to keep working with a provider that we were familiar with and trusted, we wanted to make sure that we were also choosing the best solution out there,” says network security specialist Shibu Pillai. “And that proved to be MOVEit. We were impressed with its full set of capabilities, very attractive licensing, and ease of use. We want to make sure that our end users stop using their own file transfer services, and that meant making sure that the file transfer solution we went with would be completely convenient and non-burdensome for them. Our goal in IT is enabling business with technology. In fact, that’s the tagline on my email address. With MOVEit Secure Email Attachments, we’re truly able to do so.” Feedback from end users, Shibu reports, has been “incredibly positive.”

Guelph is using MOVEit Secure Email Attachments to send large files securely and reduce the burden on their email systems. This solution supports sending and receiving files and messages between individuals and groups using Outlook or a simple browser interface, meeting employees’ need for convenience and ease of use, while enabling IT to exercise the visibility and control they need to address risky personal file sharing practices. Guelph is deploying MOVEit File Transfer, Ipswitch’s on-premise managed file transfer solution. MOVEit can also be deployed in the cloud, or in hybrid mode.

Saving Money, Saving Time

One of the benefits of the move to MOVEit Secure Email Attachments is saving on storage costs. While Guelph is still too early-on in its deployment to have an estimate of cost savings, Shibu believes that they will be significant. MOVEit Secure Email Attachments is also saving time for the IT staff. “MOVEit Secure Email Attachments has lifted a great burden off of our IT staff,” Shibu reports.

MOVEit Secure Email Attachments is very easy to set up and maintain. IT administrators can easily configure transfer settings and policies, including sender quotas, file-size limitations for attachments and ad hoc transfers (if desired: MOVEit Secure Email Attachments places no limits on file size), file-delivery notifications, password policies, embedded link-naming conventions, and file time-to-live expiration rules. Installation is also made simple. The Outlook plug-in and ActiveX browser wizard on end-user computers can be remotely installed on user computers with the MSI installation package, using Active Directory Group Policy.

Securely Transferring Files

In addition to meeting its MFIPPA and PHIPA privacy requirements, the City of Guelph must be PCI-compliant with respect to any credit card payments made for its services. With MOVEit Secure Email Attachments, files are encrypted end-to-end, in transit and at rest. “The security offered by Ipswitch’s solutions – both WS_FTP and MOVEit Secure Email Attachments – go beyond what our government would require,” Shibu says.

The Preferred Choice

Having benefited from using WS_FTP for so many years, Shibu and the IT team for the City of Guelph anticipate great success with MOVEit Secure Email Attachments. “WS_FTP is used constantly,” he notes, “And we’re seeing rapid adoption of MOVEit Secure Email Attachments, as well. It’s making everyone’s life easier, and we’re confident that it will be eliminating the use of outside file transfer approaches which, with MOVEit Secure Email Attachments’ ease of use, will no longer make much sense.”