CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY
CASE STUDY
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CUSTOMER:
Carnegie Mellon University
COVIANT PRODUCT:
DIPLOMAT MFT ENTERPRISE EDITION
Carnegie Mellon University Puts Diplomat MFT’s Flexibility to the Test
KEY REQUIREMENTS:
Flexibility to integrate with many different tools and applications, and compatibility with on-premises and cloud infrastructure systems and services
Visibility into and alerts/reporting for all jobs to ensure proper function and status
Capacity to handle regularly scheduled, ad hoc, and event-based file transfers
BENEFITS:
Reliable automation of a highly diverse job load saves time and increases productivity
PGP encryption and SFTP transport keeps private and time-sensitive data secure
Responsive customer and technical support complements CMU IT staff when needed
Security to protect student privacy and payment transactions under laws and standards like the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and Payment Card Industry Digital Security Standard (PCI DSS)
Background
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private, global research university founded by industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1900. The school is consistently ranked among the world’s top scientific, technology, and engineering educational institutions. CMU’s main campus is in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with satellite campuses in California, New York, Washington D.C., Australia, Qatar, Rwanda, and Singapore.
CMU employs more than 6,500 faculty and staff to serve a global student population of 15,000. The school manages a $3 billion endowment and an aggressive technology transfer program that has produced more than 400 startups over the past decade, including companies innovating in categories like autonomous vehicles, robotics, brain science, and big data.
The Challenge
The IT support team with Carnegie Mellon University’s Division of Student Affairs manages technology infrastructure and operations for twenty different departments at CMU. As their data management demands increased, and with each department’s IT suite running different services and applications, they needed a way to switch from manual file transfers executed on an in-house system to a managed file transfer (MFT) solution that could secure and automate their growing list of file transfer jobs.
Joe Turner, CMU’s assistant director of IT, described his team’s requirements for a managed file transfer solution:
- ⦿ Technical flexibility to operate in a hybrid IT environment including traditional on-premises and cloud infrastructure interacting with a growing selection of technologies. and services
- ⦿ The ability to easily and reliably automate a variety of file transfer jobs from twenty different departments and many outside vendors, including event-driven file transfers, regularly scheduled (daily, weekly, monthly) batch transfers, jobs scheduled at 15-minute intervals, and ad hoc transfers.
- ⦿ Offer complete auditability and operational visibility into job status, including trouble alerting, to respond to issues quickly with contextual insights and information.
- ⦿ Flexibility and scalability to grow along with the Division’s needs, and backed by a responsive technical support team available to help them innovate to solve new challenges.
“There are twenty departments that we support, and they all have different needs,” Turner said. “A lot of them have either on-site or cloud-based software that require data transfers on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis depending on the service.”
Turner also said Student Affairs had to make time-sensitive data and reports available for transfer, consumption, and analysis by other divisions at the university, making accuracy, reliability, and interoperability imperative. The MFT solution they chose would need the intelligence to know when data was fully compiled before fetching it for transfer.
“We have some internal processes that create a file from web applications that must be in the correct format and populated on an event server before transfer,” Turner explained.
Some examples of applications and uses include point-of-sale data from the university’s GrubHub service to-and-from S3 storage, meal plan subscription and use management, dormitory trouble tickets for facilities management and tracking, support for student medical services, management of on-campus digital signage, and more.
“Diplomat MFT was the best solution we found to handle all our file transfer needs. It did everything we asked of it right out of the door.”
Assistant Director of IT, Carnegie Mellon University
Joe Turner
The Solution
DIPLOMAT MFT ENTERPRISE EDITION
For many organizations, a managed file transfer solution operates in a narrow lane such as healthcare or finance. Carnegie Mellon University had a broad range of file transfer needs and so required an MFT platform capable of challenging convention.
“One of our developers told me about Diplomat MFT and said we should check it out,” Turner recalled. “The more we looked at it we realized it was very much a fit for what we were looking to do.”
Diplomat MFT’s architecture is standards-based and engineered to be technologically flexible, capable of integrating with a nearly inexhaustible list of business applications and services, cloud storage providers, and supply chain partner software. And with virtually unlimited job management capacity, Diplomat MFT could easily accommodate all the different tasks CMU would ask of it. And with built-in PGP encryption management, and support for secure transport with SFTP, the university could transfer sensitive personal, financial, and medical data with confidence.
Furthermore, CMU explained that some of the file transfer jobs they needed to manage were dependent on irregular events that could not be scheduled, but needed to be executed quickly when those events were completed.
“We have a health insurance reporting application that does not run on a regular basis, so we needed Diplomat MFT to be able to detect when that specific file shows up in the right directory, automatically grab, copy, and transfer it to its destination,” Turner said.
Such demands are no problem for Diplomat MFT. And because of its full process data capture and archiving, CMU had the complete visibility they required, along with trouble reporting should something like a loss of communications or a change of server destination result in job failure. That means Joe Turner and his team can see exactly what went wrong and how to fix it. Furthermore, as different vendors and departments within the university have migrated to the cloud over time, Diplomat MFT easily adapted to the changes – even when that meant innovating new features to meet customer needs.
“Support has been great. Years ago, during a cloud migration, we learned that AWS didn’t allow for proxy servers. We rely on a proxy server for all of our outbound connections from our secure environment so we worked with Coviant Software to address the issue,” Turner explained. “It’s nice that the development team was able to respond so quickly to that need. Support has been very helpful and quick to respond, which is great especially in those cases where we see a need.”
Carnegie Mellon University’s experience mirrors that of many organizations. Over the years, and as they have adopted a broader range of applications and cloud services, CMU has found that Diplomat MFT can easily handle any associated file transfers—reliably and securely. And as new challenges arise, Coviant Software has quickly innovated to meet the need.
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