How the Stuttgarter Lebensversicherung exchanges large files and sensitive data securely

Stuttgarter Lebensversicherung a.G.

In its more than 100-year tradition, Stuttgarter Lebensversicherung a.G. (life insurance company) has become a renowned precautionary insurer and made itself a name in the industry. Thanks to its excellent financial strength and products, which are frequently rated with the best marks, the modern and dynamic insurer is a reliable partner for private and company retirement provision as well as an excellent partner when it comes to accident,
occupational disability and risk protection. 

Stuttgarter is an association and thus exclusively committed to the interests of its insured clients. The company has established itself as a strong partner in the brokerage business and is assuring the service for its business partners through a network of branch and broker‘s offices throughout Germany.

Conflicting demands

The broker‘s insurance company, Stuttgarter Lebensversicherung a.G. works together with independent business partners and exchanges sensitive data with them daily. A trustworthy and long-term cooperation with those partners is very important to the insurance company. It attaches great importance to the fact that communication takes place in a secure way so that customer data is protected at all times.

Since every business partner has his own IT landscape, the insurance company had to check again and again which technical solution was right for all parties involved. Thus, many different solutions were created, all of which had their advantages and disadvantages. Over time, this variety has made maintenance complex and time consuming. It was therefore decided to standardize and consolidate the existing solutions.

The challenge

It was particularly challenging to find a solution that was both easy to use and sufficiently secure. The solution needed to be flexible for everyone - especially for all partners. In addition to the independent operation by the employees, the solution needed to integrate easily into the existing systems, above all the HCL Notes email client. Simple interfaces for exchanging files were therefore a prerequisite.

The solution

After all the requirements for a system had been analyzed and all existing solutions had been looked at and considered it was clear that no existing system could meet all the requirements.

In mapping the overlaps and seeing the gaps this meant that only a few systems should remain. What was missing in all of the previous solutions was simplicity of operation for the regular user. All existing solutions required an installation or implementation on the sender and the receiver side requiring significant management time. This gap was to be closed. In addition, the investment should also be convincing in economic terms. The goal was to find a new application that replaced some of the existing solutions and plugged gaps in use. With Cryptshare, the insurance company has found what they require.

The advantages

The first installation was commissioned in a few hours so that the system could be tried on the company‘s own server. For all settings and configurations the administrators used the detailed instructions from the comprehensive documentation. Thanks to the excellent help from the Cryptshare support team they were very quickly trained. In many well-known applications of this type, there is considerable individual user administration, with controls for each user to determine which files they can upload or share. Cryptshare provides a quick approach to this which can automatically be used by all employees dramatically shortening the time taken to get started. Cryptshare has been designed to be easy to use without special training or tools and in this case was up and available fast delivering benefits immediately.

The result

Since January 2017 the Stuttgarter Lebensversicherung a.G. has used Cryptshare. Even in the earliest days the software was used by many employees finding new use cases and Cryptshare is likely to be used as a tool for data exchange in other projects in the near future. The existing legacy data exchange servers are currently under review. Step by step, the processes are switched to Cryptshare. The IT team currently speaks with the process managers about deployment scenarios of Cryptshare in other areas of the company. Whilst we know that people do not like change there is a predominantly positive response and strong acceptance of the new processes.