Accellion Deployed for Secure Mobile File Sharing, File Transfer, and Collaboration While Streamlining Innovative Remote Video Survey Process
Palo Alto, CA: Wessex Water, a regional water and sewage treatment business covering 10,000 square kilometres across the UK, has deployed Accellion Secure Mobile File Sharing to secure internal and external communication, including streamlining a critical remote video inspection process.
In December 2012, Wessex Water deployed Accellion instead of ad-hoc use of competing file sharing solutions, which were deemed unsuitable for the needs of the business. The original requirement was to create a secure environment to access and share documents from a wide range of mobile devices including iPads, Windows tablets and smartphones.
The success of the original project prompted Wessex Water to expand the use of Accellion to other parts of the operation. This included the secure electronic delivery of content such as sending documents to and from regulators and partners. Accellion also allows disparate groups to collaborate on national and international projects by instantly creating secure workspaces to share content, synchronize mobile devices and manage version control.
The Accellion solution has been successfully integrated into many areas of the Wessex Water organisation. Through Accellion’s Application Programming Interface (API), Wessex Water has built custom scripts for specific line-of-business workflows within its SharePoint Enterprise Content Management system.
One of the most innovative uses of Accellion is to manage video captured from remote site surveys carried out by third party contractors. In the period of a week, up to five surveys are carried out using robotic equipment with video cameras. Each survey generates up to 15GB of video content for quality assessment and analysis of engineering work.
Prior to the switch to Accellion, video surveys would be sent via DVDs which resulted in delays to the process and a potential backlog. With Accellion, third party suppliers conducting remote surveys can now transfer video into the Wessex Water content management system to help the utility company quickly meet compliance obligations while saving 100s of work hours per week.
John Willis, Enterprise Architect at Wessex Water with responsibility for its Cloud Services, stated, “Accellion security and management capabilities gives us a major advantage. We evaluated a number of solutions for our file sharing service and most had rather rudimentary security and management controls. Accellion had all the features we required but with the addition of tight centralised control around who can share content with a full audit trail. Accellion has many of the benefits of a cloud service while allowing us to retain our data on-premise to meet our own security policies and wider compliance requirements.”
“We rest easy knowing Accellion enable us to offer a robust, secure file sharing and collaboration service,” Willis adds. “We often see organisations choose Accellion for one requirement but then end up using it for a variety of business cases, some they had never even considered,” said Paul Steiner, Accellion, Inc. Managing Director for EMEA. “We are very proud to have Wessex Water as a customer and their creativity in how they use our solution is impressive.