Office of the Comptroller of Maryland gains security and supports service innovation with Axway

The Office of the Comptroller in the State of Maryland is responsible for crucial organizational practices from collecting taxes, to salary disbursement to state workers. With over $16 billion in tax revenue collected every year, this pays more than 100,000 government employees.

This process doesn’t happen overnight. To scale efficiently, the agency needed to exchange financial data with many departments from banks to public universities, as well as thousands of individual taxpayers in Maryland.

Service innovation with Axway: Making a success

To function properly at the optimum level, many enterprises that manage large amounts of financial data rely on the mainframe to process tax and payroll information. This is no small feat! You need to be able to scale successfully and move large files efficiently.

A new approach was needed

IT Systems Specialist, Keith Thompson, of the Office of the Comptroller of Maryland, stated, “Like many organizations that manage sizeable amounts of financial data, we rely on the mainframe to process tax and payroll information.”

“To carry out our responsibilities, we must share this mainframe data with the platforms used by our banking and government partners, which include a mixture of mainframes and distributed systems.”

Ten years on, digital avenues are exploding. The Comptroller’s office needed to stay current. Legacy systems simply don’t work in today’s fast-paced environments. Security protocols and regulations change daily, so the Comptroller needed a fresh way to evolve to meet the demands. Managed File Transfer (MFT) to the rescue!

Enter MFT

While the Comptroller had a “mainframe platform” that was working, it simply couldn’t keep up with the evolving regulatory requirements around information security and data governance. Keeping up with changes in a regulated industry is not only necessary but a mandate.

Previously, the Comptroller’s office relied on FTP servers to manage file transfers, but this is an outdated and time-consuming approach — not to mention, not secure. To ensure compliance. Enter MFT.

A secure MFT solution

Achieving compliance goals doesn’t happen overnight. Decisions have to be made regarding direction and platforms. The Comptroller’s office selected SecureTransport. SecureTransport by definition is a multi-protocol MFT gateway that allows enterprises to secure, manage, and track file flows from a single point.

Thanks in part to end-to-end monitoring, reporting, and alerting built-in, the AMPLIFY™ Managed File Transfer solution helps facilitate the agency forward and hence, reduce its manual administration requirements all the while staying government-compliant with its SLAs (service-level agreements).

“What we appreciate most about SecureTransport is its flexibility.” – Keith Thompson.

SecureTransport provides a seamless exchange of the Comptroller’s files securely. This all-encompassing range of options means your enterprise profits from secure use. This permits new integrations with nearly any customer platform. Another perk is SecureTransport provides 24/7 supervision and concrete results.

Less management incumbrance

SecureTransport implementation as an on-premises appliance means the Comptroller’s office has minimal manual effort. This frees up its IT team to focus on other services.

“We needed a solution that we could trust to work reliably 24/7 without the constant supervision of our team. After our pilot project for SecureTransport, we were very impressed by how low-touch the solution was.”

Keeping up with regulatory demands is a full-time job. By working with Axway for many years, the agency implemented SecureTransport into production and designed the solution to act as a single point of management for MFT jobs.

Regulatory requirements are a moving target, and as our compliance needs have evolved, we’ve adapted SecureTransport to meet them.

New rules are out and now the IRS requires that all its partners need to encrypt data. By collaborating with Axway, the Comptroller’s office recently updated its SecureTransport platform to support at-rest and in-flight encryption. Further, they deployed a new high-availability cluster configuration to ensure resiliency, enabling the office to move IRS data via the platform.

Moving sensitive data

With SecureTransport at the core of the MFT process, the Office of the Comptroller can stay current. Security and governance change daily so having the latest regulations in place are key.

“We are now gradually migrating file-transfer workloads from legacy FTP platforms to SecureTransport, which is enabling us to decommission servers and reduce our management and maintenance overheads.”

Thanks to the re-architected SecureTransport platform, the Office of the Comptroller has seen a 25% increase in MFT workloads on the platform. They feel this will eventually increase by 75%.

SecureTransport has brought a new security measure to the Comptroller’s office, as well as strengthening which makes it much easier to monitor SLAs and provide compliance during audits.

Enter Syncplicity

Thanks to the success of MFT, the Office of the Comptroller continues to move forward by bringing better services for their users. Recently, the agency purchased Syncplicity. Syncplicity is a cloud-based file-sharing solution and collaboration tool from Axway. Syncplicity allows for more seamless execution that provides a better and more secure transmission between files.

“Syncplicity already has Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program [FedRAMP] Ready status, which meant it was easy for us to secure the buy-in we needed to move forward — and the project is already well underway.”

Further, by using Syncplicity APIs, the agency plans to create a full review trail of every transaction.