State Government Agency Dramatically Reduces IT Security Spending

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Company Background

Our client is a state government agency charged with implementing the State’s public school laws, as well as the State Board of Education’s policies and procedures. The Agency is composed of hundreds of positions that work to provide leadership and service to all local public school districts across the state within the areas of instruction, finance, technology, and personnel support.

Challenges and Requirements

The Agency oversees all public schools within the state and is in possession of Personally Indentifiable Information (PII), including home addresses, phone numbers, and social security numbers. Since the Agency is responsible for formalizing the education standards state-wide, secure communication exchange is required between the state and individual counties.

When the agency contacted PKWARE, they were looking for a solution that would replace their current private SNA Network. The cost of maintaining the private SNA Network was thousands of dollars each month, an extremely expensive solution. It was essential to find a new solution that would be both cost-effective and could be deployed within a short time frame, prior to moving from the SNA Network to a public network.

It was also critical that the Agency find a solution that would allow them to continue exchanging massive amounts of sensitive data with their external business partners, totaling over 100 different counties across the state. First and foremost, however, the data needed to be secure before moving to a public network containing multiple operating platforms.

Competitive Landscape

The Agency researched nuBridges® as another possible security solution. However, nuBridges, a point-to-point solution provider required that each end-point be licensed individually. While nuBridges would solve infrastructure issues, they would be costly to implement and did not offer additional features, such as the scalability that was critical to the Agency.

The Solution - SecureZIP PartnerLink

SecureZIP PartnerLink was a natural choice for our client. It was be deployed on their i5/OS midrange system and Linux server, providing them lowest risk, highest performance, and the easiest integration and support options for their existing and new infrastructure.

The “hub and spoke” design of SecureZIP PartnerLink allows information to be distributed from the central location, or “hub,” directly to the various end-points. Rather than transport security models, where only the transmission layer is secure, SecureZIP PartnerLink allows the data to be secure both in transit and at rest. SecureZIP PartnerLink allows our client to purchase a single solution that eliminated the high costs they were currently experiencing with the SNA Network.

SecureZIP PartnerLink also allows the Agency to distribute an unlimited number of SecureZIP Partner licenses, at no cost to their partners, furthering its cost-effectiveness. The Agency was able to deploy SecureZIP PartnerLink within a couple of weeks, eliminating their high monthly costs while providing a data security solution that ensured easy, efficient, and secure exchange of data with multiple end-points.