Building Enterprise Secure File Transfer Processes that Improve Your Security and Compliance

Executive Summary

Virtually all businesses today have work processes that dictate the need to share critical business information with people outside as well as inside the organization. The information may be highly confidential intellectual property, patient health records, sensitive customer data, financial information or the like. This presents a challenge: How to transfer data from one person or company to another in a secure, auditable, reliable, compliant and easy to use manner?

Information can be at risk of loss or exposure when it is being sent from one person to another, depending on the file transfer process that is used. Email is the easiest and most common method used, but unfortunately, it is inherently insecure. FTP also is common, and not only is it insecure, but it’s hard for the average person to use. Some people choose to put unencrypted information on CD-ROMs and send them via courier. All three of these common file transfer processes – email, FTP and CD-ROMs – are risky, normally non-auditable and “non-compliant” with legislative mandates that dictate appropriate information handling procedures.

Protecting data is a matter of observing how and when the data is at risk, and finding appropriate methods to mitigate those risks. Mandates such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), and others provide guidelines on what companies can or must do with the information they handle. Where electronic business records are concerned, it is incumbent on the IT department to take those guidelines and implement appropriate business and technology measures to ensure compliance with the legislative mandates as well as corporate policies.

In the case of a secure file transfer solution, the IT department needs to provide workers with the file transfer technology that addresses security and compliance needs without putting an unreasonable burden on normal work processes and the ways people prefer to work.

This whitepaper discusses the issues important in selecting a solution for user-touser secure file transfer that ensures your methods for handling private information adhere to your security and privacy policies and government mandates for data handling. The secure file transfer process discussed in this whitepaper is based on Accellion’s secure file transfer solution, which is currently deployed in more than 20 countries, supporting the exchange of business information between internal and external users. This solution has been chosen by numerous companies in industries that are regulated by SOX, HIPAA, GLBA and other legislation in order to increase their compliance and security posture.

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