Overview
Headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, Payformance provides both electronic and paper-based payment processing solutions to large commercial clients in industries such as banking, healthcare, insurance and retail. With over 3,500 customers, the company’s fastest growing business segment is its e-payment service, where companies outsource critical accounts payable functions to Payformance. Payformance manages all aspects of the electronic payment process, from electronic funds transfers to auditing and reporting.
Given Payformance’s longstanding commitment to protecting the privacy of its clients’ information – which contains sensitive account records, medical record numbers, social security numbers, and medical procedures – the company has decided to investigate data encryption solutions for its primary hard drive storage and secondary backup tape storage. Payformance views encryption as a best practice that would help it go above and beyond its clients’ most stringent data protection requirements. With its multi-vendor interoperability, NeoScale’s CryptoStor storage security appliances emerge as the obvious choice based on superior reliability, better management interface, and faster encryption performance.
The Challenge
In response to growth in its e-payment business and further expansion into healthcare payment processing, the company decided to re-architect its information systems and centralize its computer storage on a storage area network (SAN). The SAN would provide the benefits of a single centrally managed pool of storage, which would provide Payformance clients high performance access to applications and strong data protection and reliability.
Payformance clients are subject to the increasing number of federal, state, industry-specific and international regulations governing the protection and confidentiality of customer data and financial records. A small sampling of these regulations includes Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 for publicly traded companies; the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) for financial services firms; the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for healthcare companies; and California’s Information Privacy Act (SB 1386), requiring disclosure of all customer data breaches.
The Solution
Payformance deployed CryptoStor FC appliances in an active-passive configuration for robust failover and redundancy to protect their EMC SAN (the company operated a 2 TB EMC CLARiiON CX500-based SAN, McData switches, and QLogic FC cards). NeoScale’s CryptoStor FC passed EMC eLab™ testing and qualified for interoperability with EMC Symmetrix and EMC CLARiiON configurations. As the industry’s best performing enterprise-class storage security appliance, NeoScale’s CryptoStor FC helped Payformance achieve true wire-speed encryption at native Fibre Channel speeds with minimal latency, centralized policy management, and storage firewall access control.
Unlike competitive storage proxy appliances, CryptoStor FC’s complete invisibility to servers and storage devices helped Payformance reduce cost and complexity of deploying a storage security solution. The company also deployed CryptoStor Tape locally and at a disaster recovery center for use with its backup solution for data stored on Dell SDLT 320 tape drives.
The Result
According to George Betancourt, Payformance’s Information Security Manager, NeoScale’s solutions helped Payformance plan ahead for future data privacy regulations. “Data privacy regulations are only going to become stricter over time,” said Betancourt, “and we wanted to create a technology infrastructure today that would support tomorrow’s regulations as well as today’s. We’re very pleased with the NeoScale products. Every time I read in the news about identity thefts or lost backup tapes, it makes me wonder why any company entrusted to protect sensitive data would neglect to encrypt that data.”
NeoScale At A Glance
-Founded in 2000, NeoScale is the trusted leader in enterprise storage security and a recognized authority in Global Key Management
-Headquartered in the Silicon Valley, CA, NeoScale solutions are globally deployed in more than 35 countries
-Tamper proof appliance-based solutions with true wire-speed encryption of data on disk, virtual tape, or tape media
-Award-winning global key management to ensure customers’ business continuity and productivity in sharing sensitive information across the extended enterprise
-Successfully driving partnerships with vendors of encryption devices and software applications that are deployed throughout the enterprise IT infrastructure, from mainframes to open systems.
-Nearly 300 customers worldwide, including a fifth of the Global 50 companies, Fortune 500 financial institutions, healthcare organizations, domestic and foreign government agencies, as well as small-medium enterprises
-For more information, visit www.neoscale.com.
