What Would a $140 Million Loss Mean for Your Business?

A recent Computerworld article, “Heartland breach expenses begged at $140M — so far,” discusses the devastating effects of the Heartland Payments Systems Inc. data breach, costing the company $139.4 to date. In Heartland’s case, credit card data was compromised from the company’s network last year. The 139.4m includes settlement money from class action law suits, data breach fines and ongoing litigation fees. Moreover, no price can be placed on the damage done to its reputation. Consider it a precautionary tale.

How can you prevent this from happening to your organization?

Security measures such as firewalls are not enough to prevent a data breach and while FTP might be a “free” file transfer solution, it’s not secure. The key to ensure a data breach doesn’t happen to your business is B2B Managed File Transfer and Communications.

• Ensure security throughout the entire file transfer process
• Verify that only authorized customers and partners can send data into your network
• Protect your mission-critical data in and out of the DMZ
• Verify authorization before data is passed through your internal firewall
• Secure ad hoc communications including large files and attachments

How protected is your network?

B2B Managed File Transfer: The Business Value

Managed File Transfer solutions enable you to securely send data to your business partners, suppliers and partners. But, is that all it does? In an effort to comply with regulatory mandates, to meet customers requirements and to improve customer and partner relationships, more and more organizations are looking for the complete package.  Managed File Transfer enables organizations to meet compliance standards and provide data security, whether the transfer is internal, external or ad hoc.

Many organizations are also using EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), a particular set of standards and security protocols, to send information such as purchase orders and invoices to customers, suppliers and partners. In fact, some of the data exchange might not be the norm: X-rays, CAD files, movies, etc.  The benefits to EDI are plentiful:

• Reduced costs
• Speed
• Paper elimination
• Data entry elimination
• Greater accuracy

In close conjunction with EDI, VANs are value added networks. Approximately 90 percent of EDI transfers go through VANs. VANs act as the post office that stores, routes and delivers your files. While EDI and VANs are not new technology, integrating them with a complete MFT solution is. What if there was one solution that could handle all types of B2B communication?  There is.

Consolidate B2B Communication for Greater Visibility

B2B Managed File Transfer offers all of the above functionality, allowing you to consolidate your B2B communication workflows.  One advanced solution can centralize internal and external MFT as well as ad hoc file transfers and EDI transactions. With this solution, you benefit from greater community management, flexible integration capabilities, advanced transfer reporting, uninterrupted data flow and a centralized enterprise. The benefits of B2B MFT are:

• Security and Compliance
• Consolidation (no more silos of information)
• Leveraging Investments and Growth

Reduce costs. Become more agile. Automate processes. Scale for growth. Realize quick R.O.I.

Ultimately, the most important business value of B2B MFT is improving partner, supplier and customer relationships.

Can You Afford FTP/SFTP?

As many IT organizations can testify, FTP and SFTP solutions are not free. While there may be no license fee attached to either of these file transfer solutions, many companies spend millions per year in hardware and resource costs in an effort to make them reliable and to ensure that critical files arrive on time and intact. Data files that arrive late, corrupted or incomplete negatively impact a business both financially and from a reputation perspective.

Many companies are realizing that the security and reliability of their data transfers are paramount to their IT organization and have made significant investments to replace FTP/SFTP solutions with a Managed File Transfer solution.

Whether an organization is moving files internally or to external partners and suppliers, they need to arrive securely, on time and intact. A Managed File Transfer solution ensures this end result through high levels of fault tolerance and automatic restart of transfers from any point of failure. Any MFT solution should include the most modern and secure protocols for file encryption (SSL encryption, X.509 certificates, proxy certificates, etc.). Additionally, MFT has the ability to perform third-party transfers, enabling it to execute and manage a file transfer between sender and receiver without either party having any direct knowledge of the other’s identification credentials.

When it comes to moving critical files within your organization or to business partners, it’s critical to have the ability to manage, monitor and audit every file transfer from a central point. It would be unfeasible, let alone an invalidation of compliance procedures, if file activity wasn’t monitored for failures or that a complete audit trail of file transfers wasn’t available. Moreover, delays in data transfer mean mission-critical delays for your business.

Can you afford that?

Ensuring the Confidentiality of Your Insurance Data

With the growing amount of headlines regarding HITECH and HIPAA compliance, insurance companies should take note: payor associations and related parties are required to comply with these mandates if they partner or work with healthcare organizations (HCOs) or Providers of Service (POS). Whether you work within the healthcare insurance industry or a different segment, insurance information is susceptible to many of the new data breach regulation laws growing strength at the federal, state and local levels.

How do you protect your customers' confidential information?

Can you show the securely transfer the following information?

• Client and Patient Policy Information
• Client and Patient Payment Information
• Enrollments
• Patient
• Claims Adjudication
• Communication of Benefits
• Statement and Policy Distribution
• Insurance Application Process

Whether you are in the automotive, healthcare, property or home insurance industries, you process, email, mail or send out sensitive or proprietary information on a daily basis. How do you protect your business from costly data breaches or worse, loss of reputation and customers?