Strong security and innovative support for clustered SQL server environment sets CompleteFTP ahead in telecommunications

Based in Sweden, TeliaSonera is one of Europe’s largest telecommunication companies, providing network access and telecommunication services to more than 190 million private and corporate subscribers from Norway to Nepal.

With a heritage dating back to 1850, TeliaSonera are pioneers of the telecom industry as one of the inventors of mobile communications and founders of GSM. They continue to invest in high quality networks to meet bandwidth demand and are committed to superior customer experience.

TeliaSonera’s IT department supports more than 25,000 employees worldwide. When their clients – the internal business units of TeliaSonera – need a new business application, they expect fast delivery of a stable, secure and scalable platform.

To support the volume and variety of business applications, TeliaSonera IT maintain several large clustered SQL server environments. A standard virtual server configuration can be launched on demand for each new business application within this environment, providing the database, hosting, reporting and integration infrastructure required. FTP is a vital part of this standard configuration to support application integration and transfer of data between systems within the company.

The Challenge - Maintaining a Clustered Environment

For a company the size of TeliaSonera, clustering is vital to enable load balancing, reliability and high availability during regular infrastructure maintenance without disruption to business unit operations. However, using Window’s native FTP tools, maintaining a clustered environment was a cumbersome and error prone process. Local user permissions would be set up in advance then manually copied to each node in the cluster. Completing routine updates, like a change of password, became long and complex procedures, open to an unacceptable risk of error.

The Solution - Implementing CompleteFTP

By implementing CompleteFTP within their clustered environment, TeliaSonera have been able to simplify user management and configuration significantly, with the combined benefit of reduced IT staff workload in system administration and greatly reduced risk of error.

CompleteFTP Enterprise supplies synchronized and instantaneous server configurations across the cluster. One server instance is designated as the primary server. Configuration changes made on this primary are instantly propagated to all the secondary servers in the cluster. A single instance of the CompleteFTP Manager can therefore control all the servers in the cluster.

“The manual management of user accounts and FTP server configuration that we were previously struggling with was simply too time consuming and open to an unacceptable risk of error,” says Joakim Wallster, Database Architect at TeliaSonera. “CompleteFTPs performance in a clustered environment helps us work efficiently and effectively with a solution that is unique in the market.”