Hyundai Australia drives collaboration with secure file sharing

Car manufacturer no longer uses USB sticks

Photo credit: Hyundai Australia.

Photo credit: Hyundai Australia.

Security has improved at Hyundai Australia since the car manufacturer deployed an enterprise-grade file sharing and collaboration system.

Hyundai Australia infrastructure manager Kawa Farid told Computerworld Australia that prior to the rollout in 2010, employees were saving files on to a USB stick and using a courier service to send documents.

The company tried using Microsoft Windows’ built-in FTP client but staff were routinely locked out. In addition, the transfer method was unencrypted.

“Our marketing department often has last-minute file transfer requests, needing to send images or video files to external partiers for approval,” Farid said.

“We didn’t want our business operations impacted because we were waiting for files to get where they needed to go, nor did we want users turning to unsecure solutions such as Dropbox.”

After downloading a trial version of Accellion, Farid decided that the file transfer solution met security and industry regulations.

“The main benefit has been the ability for end users to send files to third party companies in a secure manner,” he said.

Because it employs a large sales force, the company plans to roll out the solution to employees’ smartphones and tablets. It may be deployed to users by December 2013.

The file sharing system is hosted in Hyundai’s own data centre. According to Farid, it chose not to go down the cloud services route due to security concerns.

“We wanted to maintain close control of the product, our data and documents,” he said. “From Hyundai’s point of view we don’t [want to] do much with cloud services as yet.”

He added that the company needed something with the flexibility of cloud computing and security of on-premise computing.

Within Australia, 200 employees have access to the file sharing system. The marketing department acted as an early adopter, followed by the IT department and parts team.

Farid added that the company uses Accellion’s audit trail and reporting capabilities to see when files were sent and by whom.

“We now have total visibility from the time the file gets sent to the time it is received,” he said.

“The amount of time to share business files has been reduced to just seconds and three years after deployment, the product is working just as it should to support our business needs.”

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Tags file sharingsecurity toolsHyundaiAccellion

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