Securing File Transfers in a Corporate Network

Customer Challenge:

"We are regularly updating price lists in two thousand stores across the country. The updating process has been automated using FTP scripts in our server environment that run Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The requirement to comply with Sarbannes-Oxley Act (SOX) forced us to find a solution to secure the FTP traffic."

Tectia Solution:

Tectia ConnectSecure was deployed in the customer's environment. Three Linux servers run FTP scripts and each handles the file traffic to about seven hundred stores. Tectia ConnectSecure was deployed on each Linux server for automatic conversion of FTP to SFTP. Tectia ConnectSecure is able to grab the destination host, username and password from the FTP scripts in order to seamlessly open secure communication connections to the OpenSSH servers operated in the stores.

Existing FTP transfers are now automatically converted to SFTP and directed to the destination hosts in the stores. As there are OpenSSH servers running on the servers in the stores, no changes were required because Tectia ConnectSecure works also with OpenSSH.

Figure 2.3. Tectia ConnectSecure securing file transfers

Customer Benefits:

FTP traffic was converted to encrypted SFTP to meet auditor requirements.
Costs were kept under control because network infrastructure required only small changes.