Our client is one of the world’s largest financial institutions, providing individual consumers, small/mid-market businesses, and large corporations a full range of banking, investing, asset management, and other financial and risk-management products and services. The company serves more than 54 million consumers and small businesses across the globe.

In order to be in compliance with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) data encryption requirements, the company needed the ability to centrally manage user rights for encrypting data. Additionally, the solution had to allow them to limit employee encryption capabilities based on job function. The company also wanted a compression solution that could be centralized and was easy to manage and maintain.

The company was using WinZip® for data compression on over 20,000 desktops throughout their organization. In 2006, WinZip engaged the company in maintenance renegotiations, wanting to tie maintenance renewal pricing to the original purchase price, timeframe, and quantities as opposed to starting with a general Enterprise agreement. This turned out to be fairly expensive and extremely complex for the company to manage, as they had purchased different licenses and quantities at various times over several years.

Faced with this kind of complexity, WinZip’s lack of key functionality, and the huge amount of desktops needing compression, the company decided to seek out a solution that would better serve their requirements.

The company chose PKZIP because they felt it was easy to deploy, manage, and use cost effectively. PKZIP’s policy manager capabilities enable administrators to define how their end-users encrypt information, allowing them to turn off the encryption capability for those employees who do not need to use it.

The company also realized the value of the migration path from PKZIP to SecureZIP. They recognized that when they needed to improve their desktop security, they could upgrade the appropriate users to the more advanced security capabilities of SecureZIP without disrupting their current processes.

Another key benefit of choosing PKZIP was the ability to eventually standardize compression and security on all computing platforms. This will give the company fewer vendors to work with, contracts to manage, and systems to learn, reducing their overall cost of doing business. The company is well on their way to achieving this goal--they already use SecureZIP on their mainframes and are currently identifying a migration plan to implement SecureZIP on their desktops.