Enabling 100 percent availability for mission-critical file transfers with Axway
Founded in 1992 and headquartered in Hanover, Maryland, Ciena is a global leader in networking systems, services, and software. With over three decades of expertise, the company builds adaptive networks that enable richer and more connected user experiences.
As part of its efforts to ensure a great customer experience, Ciena has to effectively orchestrate a wide range of interconnected business processes including supply chain planning, sales, manufacturing, warehouse management, logistics, and more. The company looks to its managed file transfer (MFT) capabilities to facilitate secure, reliable data exchange between these mission-critical systems.
Manoj Kona, Director — Enterprise Integration & Automation at Ciena, says: "MFT plays a vital role in the smooth-running of our day-to-day business operations. CIena is now embarking on a major digital transformation initiative, which includes building a brand-new data lake for advanced analytics. Our MFT capabilities will be crucial to support that effort."
As a global enterprise, Ciena must comply with a wide range of regulatory requirements, including System and Organization Controls (SOC) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). With its legacy MFT platform showing signs of strain, the company decided to look for a new solution to help ensure that sensitive data is protected and accessible at every stage of the lifecycle.
Kona elaborates: "Because we rely on our MFT platform to connect with key partners such as banks and logistics providers, unplanned downtime has the potential to impact customer services. We needed to replace our legacy MFT tool with a solution that offers the availability, security, and compliance capabilities to underpin our long-term transformation objectives."
Secure, scalable MFT solution
Ciena selected Axway SecureTransport to support its mission-critical file transfers. Delivering scalability, reliability, and rich functionality, the Axway solution also enables the company to meet its rigorous information security and data governance requirements.
"SecureTransport gives us the peace of mind that our data is encrypted in flight and at rest," confirms Kona. "We greatly appreciate how easy it is to integrate the solution with other software in our environment, including our identity provider and tools like Splunk. With SecureTransport, it's also very straightforward to configure user roles and access rights to ensure that our file transfers are fully compliant and highly secure."
Deploying fast with expert support
Working with support from Axway Professional Services, Ciena deployed SecureTransport to its private cloud platform. With scalable architecture and an elastic licensing model, the solution offers Ciena the flexibility to accomodate growtn in file transfer volumes easily and cost-effectively.
"Unlike other MFT platforms we considered, SecureTransport gives us a great deal of freedom around how we deploy, configure and manage the solution," says Kona. "Because the solution is cloud agnostic, we were able to deploy it without making changes to our infrastructure platform."
Kona adds: "Another thing that none of the other vendors we considered could match was the quality and responsiveness of Axway Professional Services. We support a complex ecosystem of MFT use cases for the business and moving from a 20-year-old legacy platform to a new solution was no simple task. Despite the complexity of the project, he Axway Professional Services team helped us migrate to SecureTransport in just seven months — an impressive achievement."
Delivering 100 percent availability
SInce moving to SecureTransport, Ciena has achieved an increase in the availability and reliability of its MFT services.
Kona comments: "We've now been using SecureTransport for eight months, and in all that time the solution has not dropped for a single second. The Axway solution is so reliable that it just fades into the background; our users take it for granted that MFT capabilities are accessible 24/7."
Enabling defense in depth
By deploying SecureTransport on a multi-tier architecture, Ciena can augment the native security capabilities of the solution with a range of cloud-native tools, including web application firewalls, denial-of-service protection and other network-level defenses.
"Axway adds a valuable layer of capabilities on top of SFTP, including role-based access management," says Kona. "SecureTransport enables us to automate a number of functions that previously required manual effort, such as enforcing our file-retention policies. We can also leverage Axway APIs to allow other digital workflows to consume MFT services in a secure, auditable and well-governed way."
Offering seamless user experience
By building on secure, automated MFT capabilities from Axway, Ciena is streamlining the user experience for internal and external stakeholders.
"In the past, setting up new MFT connections was a time-consuming, manual process that depended on both sides coordinating via email," explains Kona. "With SecureTransport, we've streamlined and automated these processes, which allows us to accelerate the onboarding of new partners from days to hours or even minutes. Thanks to reliable and secure MFT from Axway, we can empower the business to deliver an excellent service to our global customers."
Accelerating digital transformation
"We currently use a home-grown MFT tool to allow our support engineers to exchange files with customers, but the long-term vision is to replace this tool with the Axway solution," confirms Kona. "As our digital transformation initiative gains pace, SecureTransport will play a key role — for example, by helping us to standardize and consolidate our data lakes into a single analytics repository."
Kona concludes: "Technology is a means to an end, but not an end in itself: it's people who make or break projects like these. In Axway, we have found a true partner that listens to our feedback and is committed to our success."
Scalable, secure file transfer.
