Case Study - luxury watch manufacturer
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Iconic Luxury Watchmaker Securely Shares Intellectual Property With Partners and Enhances Sales Operations
This leading luxury wristwatch manufacturer is one of the world’s most recognized brands. Sharing information was not the main challenge for this company, but rather sharing information efficiently and securely.
Sales and marketing personnel relied on a third-party File Transfer Protocol (FTP) solution to share and collaborate with retail partners on product designs, advertisements, sales forecasts, product display images, and other proprietary information. FTP was cumbersome to use and required employees to jump through extra hoops to get large files to internal colleagues and partners outside the organization.
Seeking a Replacement for FTP
The company was admittedly cautious with respect to new technology adoption, but one thing was certain: A multi-tenant public cloud solution was out of the question; their content was simply too valuable. “We had an immediate need to deploy a file sharing solution with enterprisegrade security that would give our employees an easy-to-use tool for accessing and sharing sensitive content externally—whether they were in the office or the field,” explains Brian, a systems administrator with the company.
One of the driving forces to find a new solution was to support the company’s North American sales managers, who regularly transmitted proprietary client information to U.S. headquarters using FTP. The system did not have the built-in layers of security required to meet the IT department’s data protection requirements.
“We were sold on Kiteworks’ ability to securely span platforms as it provided us with universal and instant access to files in multiple enterprise content systems, including SharePoint—from laptops, desktops, tablets, and smartphones,” Brian asserts.
“We had an immediate need to deploy a file sharing solution with enterprise-grade security that would give our employees a tool for easy and secure content access, file sharing and collaboration— wherever their work takes them.”
– Brian, Systems Administrator
Case Study
Iconic Luxury Watchmaker Securely Shares Intellectual Property With Partners and Enhances Sales Operations
Deploying a Secure Solution
The company deployed Kiteworks as an on-premises virtual appliance. The Kiteworks architecture, with its dedicated and isolated cloud infrastructure, enabled the company to keep its servers, data storage, encryption keys, and authentication all within the IT organization’s complete control—a major selling point as security was a top priority.
“When our North American employees found out that we had the same file transfer capabilities as our global headquarters [another Kiteworks customer], employees started asking for Kiteworks by name,” Brian recalls. “And when they discovered that Kiteworks was more than a simple file sharing solution—that it enabled true collaboration, we suddenly had use cases that we did not even expect.”
Leveraging Kiteworks for Multiple Use Cases
Kiteworks is being utilized to support:
- Digital and print advertising – the company’s art department sends large images for magazine spreads to editorial contacts at various media outlets.
- Sales initiatives – sales managers instantly access and review up-to-date key metrics and reports from any location, using any type of mobile device, without a VPN—a huge time saver.
- Partner and customer communications – sales representatives exchange sales figures and forecasts with partners and retail outlets
- Corporate expansion – project managers collaborate on building plans and blueprints with developers, architects, contractors, and sub-contractors.
“The beauty of Kiteworks is that it just works—it does everything it claims to do and does it well,” Brian concludes. “It is a breeze to configure and customer support is excellent. But beyond that, Kiteworks’ ability to keep our content secure makes the investment worth it. As a result, our adoption continues to grow.”
Needs
- Deploy a file sharing solution that’s more secure and easier to use than FTP
- Protect proprietary client information transmitted from the field to headquarters
Kiteworks Solution
- Kiteworks content firewall for secure file sharing
Business Impact
- Protect an iconic brand’s priceless intellectual property
- Secure proprietary information shared between employees and partners
- Enable real-time availability of sales report information, without VPN
- Drive effective collaboration with partners
“Kiteworks’ ability to keep our content secure makes the investment worth it. As a result, our adoption continues to grow.”
– Brian, Systems Administrator
