Customer Success Story: IT Consulting Firm Protects 50TB of PII with SecureZIP®

Company Background

D-Cubed Media Conversions (D3MC) is a consulting firm with over 120 years of IT experience, providing data and document conversion services to a global customer base in government, banking, insurance, financial services, healthcare, utilities, oil & gas, retail, and telecommunications industries. D3MC is a specialist in consolidating systems as a result of corporate acquisitions or purchase of new technologies.

D3MC also offers conversion and migration services for tape and optical media, as well as data and documents. D3MC performs conversion services at the customer site or at their own facilities in a complete off-line process, utilizing their own hardware and proprietary software, resulting in no impact to their customers’ production environments.

Challenges and Requirements

D3MC works extensively with various financial services organizations. One such organization hired D3MC to handle a project involving the consolidation of an acquired bank’s check archive system to their own. This project, which involved a total of 150 Terabytes (TB) of data including 6.6 billion check images and 144 SQL databases, had to be finished in six months.

D3MC needed to convert these check images and index metadata into a new file format for delivery back to the customer for ingestion into their own check archive system.

Since the resulting 55 TB of converted data would contain sensitive financial information, as well as personally identifiable information (PII) about the bank’s customers, it was imperative the data be encrypted before going back to D3MC’s customer.

Competitive Landscape

During D3MC’s research process, they investigated both PGP® and WinZip® as potential solutions, but SecureZIP included more beneficial features and was more cost-effective. D3MC also needed a solution that would be configurable within their organization and be implemented quickly to begin handling large amounts of data. In addition, D3MC writes a lot of conversion software that is database driven – SecureZIP allowed them to update their database about the success or failure of the encryption process for each file.

The Solution – SecureZIP Enterprise Edition

All 150 TB of data was sent to D3MC on tape and moved from tape to disk for conversion. The data was then run through D3MC’s proprietary conversion process, utilizing 25 of D3MC’s servers where it was transformed into a proprietary file format. All conversion work was done at D3MC’s secure facility in Houston, Texas, and was performed only using D3MC’s hardware, proprietary software, and personnel. Neither the customer’s source nor target archive applications were required and the entire conversion process was performed using D3MC’s off-line process, saving the customer money and time.

SecureZIP for Server Enterprise Edition easily and efficiently met all of D3MC’s needs. The company was able to create a fully audited encryption solution utilizing SQL Server’s Integration Services. This allowed D3MC to have a completely audited conversion process. This solution queries the database, finds the files to be encrypted on disk, and then encrypts them using SecureZIP. Encryption is performed on a file-by-file basis with each file about one-half Gigabyte in size. In all, SecureZIP encrypted over 50 TB of information for this project.

While SecureZIP encrypts massive amounts of information for D3MC, it also allows a database-driven process to handle the encryption in order to monitor the encryption success and throughput rate. Using just two single Quad-Core servers to perform the file encryption using SecureZIP, D3MC was able to encrypt over 50 TB of data in just two weeks. D3MC is looking to expand their use of SecureZIP with additional clients and projects in the future.