Leading Financial Services Provider Protects Data Exchanged with Multiple Endpoints, Secures Email Communication

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Company Background

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.

Challenges and Requirements

The company needed to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which required them to protect credit card data as it is transmitted, processed, and/or stored, impacting several processes throughout their organization. Initially, the company set out to protect and store credit card dispute information for the PCI mandated minimum of 7 years.

This information was taking up space on their UNIX server, so the company wanted a solution that could both encrypt and compress the data. Every night, hundreds of thousands of settlement transactions containing confidential credit card information are sent to companies of all sizes. Without secure, dedicated lines set up for data transfer with smaller merchants, this confidential credit card data was sent via fax.

In an effort to secure this process, the company established an initiative to move all fax transmissions to email, electronically transferring encrypted data to multiple endpoints that would then have to decompress and decrypt the data after it was received. The data for these transactions originates on the company's z/OS mainframe and is then transferred to an internal server before it is sent externally to merchants. The company wanted a solution that would be easy to use and cost effective, especially for their business partners.

The Solution - SecureZIP (Multiple Computing Platforms)

As soon as the company purchased SecureZIP, they quickly realized the solution could work for additional security initiatives throughout the organization. They engaged PKWARE for assistance in achieving strong enterprise security across all major computing platforms.

The company wanted to use PKI to facilitate secure email communication both internally and externally with business partners. SecureZIP was the only solution that could provide the level of functionality, customization, and ease of use required. The company also incorporated the RSA Keon Certificate Authority product as well as the PKWARE ZIP reader to round out the solution.

SecureZIP provides seamless integration with the centralized directories containing digital certificates issued by RSA. This supported the requirement for processing secure transactions without slowing the delivery of reports to their partners. PKWARE's free ZIP reader extends the benefits of SecureZIP to the company's large network of partners without requiring them to purchase additional software. As a result, our client is able to securely communicate with, and send information to, its partners, regardless of the their computing environment or security infrastructure.