Resources Customer Success Stories Manufacturing

Manufacturer Meets SOX Requirements with Strong Encryption, while also Increasing Operational Efficiencies

Industry

  • Manufacturing

Customer Profile

  • Provider of industrial automation power control and information systems and services

Challenges

  • Meeting data security compliance standards and requirements, including SOX
  • Reducing data center costs and operational overhead; finding a cost-effective solution

PKWARE® Solution

  • SecureZIP® for z/OS®

Results

  • Use of strong encryption met SOX compliance requirements
  • Increased operational efficiencies by conserving time and bandwidth and minimally impacting processing and system utilization

Company Background

Our client is a provider of industrial automation power, control, and information systems and services. The company operates domestically and internationally, including a Partner Network of thousands of regional and global specialists in distribution, system integration, and product referencing.

Challenges and Requirements

After conducting an internal audit, the company determined that they could be facing substantial fines for non-compliance with SOX requirements as a result of HR data that was being sent to a third-party provider. The Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that required encryption was being sent to the provider from the company’s mainframe.

One of the company’s key requirements was the ability to add encryption without impacting other business processes and system utilization. The company was also concerned about the cost to upgrade their bandwidth to handle the new traffic. They estimated that this upgrade could cost as much as $24,000 more each month to conduct the nightly transfer of information.

The Solution - SecureZIP

Our client's goal was to research, implement, and test SecureZIP in their environment in one month. The company chose SecureZIP because of its cross-platform interoperability and because they could initiate it in both automated and interactive environments. SecureZIP provided the ability to securely transfer files from PCs to UNIX boxes to mainframes.

The company also selected SecureZIP because it offered the shortest time to implementation and the best system performance. Using SecureZIP, the company is able to provide strong encryption to meet SOX requirements while minimally impacting processing times through the use of data compression. SecureZIP enables them to send 9 DB files compressed from 1GB to 200MB nightly, saving both time and bandwidth.