Dun & Bradstreet fuels data-driven services with Axway Managed File Transfer

Dun & Bradstreet delivers business intelligence that helps enterprises to compete, grow, and thrive. As file transfer volumes exploded, the company turned to Axway Managed File Transfer to maintain strict governance and security controls while ensuring fast and easy access to data.

Read on to learn how D&B continues to foster innovation with fast, secure, and centrally governed data-sharing in this MFT case study.

Delivering data-driven business insights

Dun & Bradstreet’s business runs on data — and the company shares millions of records with thousands of internal and external stakeholders each month.

Through the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud, the company empowers businesses to steer well-informed decisions that build revenues, reduce risk, control costs, and support digital transformation.

These insights come from Dun & Bradstreet’s hundreds of millions of records on companies around the world. Mastered to a unique, nine-digit company identifier — known as a D&B D‑U‑N‑S Number — these records include registered names, addresses, credit histories, and more.

Because of a heavy reliance on file transfers, D&B’s data originates and terminates in thousands of different locations inside the corporate firewall and beyond. The company needed a way to improve the visibility, control, and cost-effectiveness of its approach to data-sharing.

Moving beyond SFTP to Managed File Transfer

Jim Martone, VP Engineering at Dun & Bradstreet, says file transfers are becoming an increasingly important way to exchange data. Many of the company’s systems move large volumes of data in bulk, and as business demand grew, D&B stood up dedicated FTP servers to handle the traffic.

But he knew managing multiple separate FTP servers would present significant challenges in the long term: for one, it was going to be hard to scale as growth continued, and the siloed approach made it difficult to determine that file transfers were being managed in line with the company’s stringent data governance policies.

D&B’s teams needed visibility, governance, and high availability so they could concentrate on delivering valuable business intelligence – without the burden of managing a technical platform. It was time for Managed File Transfer services.

Dun & Bradstreet selected Axway Managed File Transfer, including Axway SecureTransport (a secure, extensible MFT gateway), and Axway Transfer CFT (a multi-platform file transfer controller). The end-to-end solution is managed from a single point of control using Axway Flow Manager.

Here’s how Managed File Transfer made a difference in comparison to SFTP.

Visibility & Governance

With MFT, Dun & Bradstreet now has central visibility of transfers across the enterprise. And the company has stronger governance for other data flows: for example, offering more secure and user-friendly alternatives to sending confidential information via email, network file shares, or cloud-based storage solutions.

“Managed File Transfer offers Dun & Bradstreet all the capabilities we need to support our highly distributed file-sharing architecture,” says Jim Martone, VP Engineering, Dun & Bradstreet.

“We can deploy on the mainframe, on-premises, and in hybrid and multicloud environments, while still maintaining all-important control over data moving across the business.”

Using role-based permissions in SecureTransport, Dun & Bradstreet is also enabling self-service capabilities for the business — freeing IT personnel to focus on innovation, and contributing to greater operational efficiency.

High availability, scaling for the future

Today, D&B uses Managed File Transfer to transfer 40 TB of data reliably each month.

“Whether we’re moving a few dozen records or transferring 100 million of them, we need to know we can trust our MFT systems to be reliable and secure. SecureTransport gives us that peace of mind,” adds Martone.

In addition to 24/7 availability (commitment of 99.9%), Managed File Transfer offers cost-effective scalability, meaning there is flexibility to integrate capabilities as the organization grows.

These days, Dun & Bradstreet is planning for the future. The company intends to extend its file distribution network with new deployments across a mixture of on-premises and cloud data centers globally — all centrally managed and orchestrated with Flow Manager.

“It would be impossible to provide our services and meet our regulatory obligations without a solution like Axway Managed File Transfer,” concludes Martone.

“By continuing our work with Axway, we’re excited to start using API integrations with Axway Transfer CFT, Axway Secure Transport, and our own custom-developed systems to deliver innovative data sharing use-cases for the business.”