12 November 2009

Wells Fargo and Company in the US is a diversified financial services company that provides banking, insurance, investments, mortgage and consumer finance solutions. It has US$575 billion in assets and employs 159,800 team members across more than 80 businesses.

The company processes and manages large volumes of sensitive customer financial data on a daily basis, of which maintaining the privacy and security of that data is key to its operations. Recently, Wells Fargo sought a more advanced and reliable way of tracking and managing the hard disk drives and portable computers that store its crucial information.

Firstly, Wells Fargo wanted to be able to track hard disk drive life cycles for the protection and proper handling of sensitive customer data in order to reduce the risk of a breech. Secondly, it wished to track laptops and their properly assigned users at various points. IT management decided that using RFID-based technology would best meet its requirements, although the high metal content in the disk drives and laptop PCs made it difficult to place and scan the RFID tags.

Wells Fargo selected Xterprise to engineer a reliable, cost-effective solution. Using Clarity ITAM Enterprise Asset Management, which leverages advanced RFID capabilities to track and manage a wide range of IT, production and transport items and assets, and a comprehensive asset management approach including all hardware and software, Xterprise has provided the financial services company with a much enhanced security system.

Developed on the Microsoft software platform with BizTalk Server 2006 R2, BizTalk RFID and SQL Server, the Clarity ITAM solution allows Wells Fargo to automatically track hard disk drives throughout their lifecycle, including secure end-of-life destruction. By ensuring assets are read and tracked at key operational points within the bank, this Xterprise RFID-based solution reduces the risk that private financial data will be compromised. The solution is also employed to track and manage laptop computers used by Wells Fargo associates. This solution provides simple, easy-to-use feedback to security personnel. That feedback includes visual verification whenever a laptop moves on or off the Wells Fargo campus, with the laptop user’s photograph displayed as the laptop is carried through an RFID-enabled security portal.

Wells Fargo has now strengthened its control over hard drives, laptops and customer financial data; can update its IT asset inventory quickly and automatically; has reduced the time and cost of tracking and reconciling IT inventories; reduced space requirements in regional data centers; and has met all Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements.

Bank officials report that they are now able to competently track and manage IT assets with the RFID tagging and Clarity ITAM software solution from Xterprise. The bank has reduced the risk of financial data loss, and thus far, no IT asset-related security breaches have occurred under this RFID-tracking system.

This article first appeared in the 2009/10 edition of the Finance on Windows Partner Guide.

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