Secure FTP Helps Financial Giant Adhere to SOX

For IT managers in regulated industries, audits are a way of life. Proactive record keeping will be critical for when those pesky auditors walk through the front door. This is where a secure FTP (sFTP) tool can play a big role. In a post-Enron world, transparency is key for businesses in the finance sector, but moving parts are plentiful.

An important aspect of regulatory compliance, such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) is knowing where your critical business data is at all times: at rest and in transit.

Security Controls for Mitigating Risk

In a fictitious example of insider trading, say a rogue employee sends earnings data showing negative profitability to a friend on Wall Street before such earning were made public for shareholders. What controls does your IT team have in place to identify and mitigate security risks like this? How do you implement these controls without creating bottlenecks that become a manual labor time suck?

Raymond James Financial is a large employer based in the Tampa Bay community with over 2,200 locations worldwide. One of their mottos is ‘plan before the plan and then keep planning.’ That’s why they were an early adopter of SOX regulations. But in order for Raymond James to be SOX compliant, they needed to change how they secured their data.

Raymond James Financial was faced with 3 key data transfer challenges:

• Securely transfer confidential client information that could scale as they grew
• Comply with the new SOX regulations
• Track all file transfer activities for auditing purposes

Flexible and Secure FTP

This is where a flexible secure file transfer solution came in. By implementing WS_FTP Professional, Raymond James was able to trace all data transmissions and integrate automated security controls into their secure file transfer process.

Learn more about how WS_FTP can help secure your data.

“We are able to transfer files in a secure way through the encryption that we run through WS_FTP Professional,” says John Beede, Team Lead for Raymond James’ Windows Production Control.

Due to the open nature and flexibility of WS_FTP Professional, Raymond James was able to use WS_FTP’s powerful encryption for secure file transfers, keep logs of file transfers for record keeping, as well as easily customize WS_FTP to fit their critical business needs.

“The ability to wrap executables with our own scripts enables us to have a lot of flexibility. Generally, we’ve got the scripts written around the WS_FTP executable. That’s a great adaptation,” Beed exclaims.

Implementing WS_FTP resulted in the following for Raymond James:

• Reduction of manual, costly, tasks with reliable, secure scripts to automate tasks
• Ease of integration into existing infrastructure and processes
• Ability to grow the file transfer capability as the business grows

To learn more about how Raymond James implemented WS_FTP, make sure to check out the full case study.