Customer Case Study

Avondale Partners, LLC
A medium-sized investment banking firm operating out of Nashville Tennessee and serving the national and international marketplace. Representatives are frequent travellers who require access to their e-mail account and key files residing on company servers. To address this, Avondale chose FileWay™ integrated into a Microsoft OWA e-mail solution.

FileWay resides on its own internal server and authenticates users with username/password using the built-in FileWay .NET proxy through active directory. Separate servers house the Exchange 2000 mail server and Active Directory applications.

The following figure illustrates high-level architecture
for FileWay Deployment at Avondale Partner

The firm’s ‘road warriors’ consist of investment bankers, traders and security analysts. VPN solutions would have been difficult to implement broadly as these travellers often find themselves behind client and partner firewalls making outbound access difficult if not impossible to obtain, not to mention network connection privileges. The cost and maintenance of laptops with custom clients was also a prime concern. By utilizing the FileWay/OWA solution, corporate travellers can have ready and secure access to their files and e-mails from virtually anywhere in the world, even if they leave their laptop at the office. All that’s required is a browser and Internet access.

When fully-deployed, 40 remote users will be enabled to use this service, with additions easily and inexpensively accommodated as needed.

“Confidentiality of sensitive information is maintained by allowing only HTTPS on port 443 through the Firewall in a 1:1 NAT set up. This greatly simplifies configuration without compromising security. In addition, users can easily be added as a function of normal administration of Active Directory.”

Adam Bell, Senior Systems Engineer at Avondale