Profile
The United Nations (UN), founded in 1945, is an international organization committed to maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations and promoting social progress, better living standards, and human rights. The UN provides a forum for its 193 Member States to discuss and take action on a wide range of current fundamental issues including sustainable development, disaster relief, expanding food production and more. With their work reaching every corner of the globe, efficient information sharing over vast geographical distances is an essential process when addressing global issues and striving to achieve goals for a safer world for this and future generations.
Challenges
As a central hub of the UN’s information sharing, the UNIFEED department receives regular briefings from the field on missions. The updates are posted on the Department of Peacekeeping Operations website as well as other publications. These updates come in the form of audio and video files which can become very large and hard to transfer. These assets are usually transferred via email or different ad hoc methods such as shipping physical storage mediums or via 3rd party public FTP tools. Aside from extremely slow transfer speeds, these file transfer methods weren’t user-friendly and created potential security risks.
Solutions
To eliminate the slow transfers, the UN implemented FileCatalyst Direct to provide secure, reliable and accelerated transfers. FileCatalyst Direct is immune to packet loss and latency caused by poor network conditions, eliminating file transfer bottlenecks and quickly delivering files of any size or format to any location. FileCatalyst Server (software only) was deployed at the UN headquarters in New York, NY to serve as the central point of management for all accelerated file transfers. Finally, the FileCatalyst HotFolder client application was distributed globally to the machines of end users, enabling the UN to set scheduled transfers and allocate bandwidth as needed.
Results
FileCatalyst’s deployment immediately addressed their transfer speed issues, while adding further reliability and security. “FileCatalyst Direct brought us up to speed regarding file transfer speeds, allowing us to transfer files that once took hours in minutes,” said Jose Villegas, Collaboration Systems Administrator.
The FileCatalyst platform also helped save the UN time by establishing a simplified file transfer processes for end users executing or scheduling file transfers. “Aside from the speed gains, we found FileCatalyst to be a much more reliable and resilient method of file delivery over an FTP application, which tends to disconnect on high latency or low bandwidth connections,” added Jose Villegas. “These improvements enable us to cover more up-to-date situational reports on the field because the turnaround time for ingesting reports and their supporting materials was drastically reduced.”