State Government Agency Secures External Data Exchange at No Cost to Business Partners

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Company Background

Our client is a state government agency that serves as the Chief Financial Officer for their state, collecting billions of dollars each year in state and local tax revenue used for state-funded programs. As a fee-based service bureau, the Agency also provides Information Technology (IT) services critical to the daily operation of many of their individual state agencies. In addition, the Agency regulates the state’s alcohol, tobacco, and motor fuel industries and serves as a member of many state boards and commissions.

Challenges and Requirements

Our client does a great deal of business with external business partners, including state and local government agencies, as well as corporations. They required a data security solution that would support varying transaction volumes and frequencies, but, at the same time, could address a broad range of technical capabilities that their business partners represented.

The Agency’s external business partners are varied, ranging from large financial institutions with significant IT resources to small state and local government agencies with limited IT resources and technical capabilities. Due to the mixture of computing platforms and end-user IT expertise, it was essential that the recipient community react favorably to the Agency’s security directive and adapt it into their processes.

Our client also needed a cost-effective solution that would take the disparate mix of business partners and IT environments into account and extend a solution that would be easy to deploy and use. In addition, the solution had to address the bidirectional secure transfer of data files via FTP that offered the flexibility to scale to multiple platforms without changing the existing infrastructure. The solution required the secure, efficient exchange of critical business information with little to no interruption at the origin or endpoint(s).

The Solution - SecureZIP PartnerLink

The Agency was already using PKZIP by PKWARE on their mainframe. Upgrading to SecureZIP PartnerLink was simple. SecureZIP PartnerLink provided the lowest risk, highest performance, and the easiest integration and support options for their existing infrastructure, allowing daily operations to continue without interruption.

SecureZIP PartnerLink allows the Agency to distribute an unlimited number of SecureZIP Partner licenses, at no cost, to their partners. Being a “no cost” solution furthered partner acceptance and eased the adoption process. The Agency can extend their security policies, regardless of the number of endpoints or computing environments involved in the exchange.

Our client is now effectively protecting data at the file level, making it impossible for anyone except authorized personnel to access it, whether the data is at rest or in transit being exchanged via FTP. SecureZIP PartnerLink provides a cross-platform security solution that offers encryption, digital signing, and authentication. It also supports the AES encryption standard, meeting the Agency’s other technical requirement of AES 256-bit encryption.

As a “no cost” solution, implementing SecureZIP PartnerLink furthered business partner acceptance and eased the adoption process. In the end, our client eliminated the risk of exposing sensitive information being exchanged with external business partners by implementing a solution that accommodated current partners with the added ability to scale to meet the Agency’s future needs as new partners are added.