Wake County Public School System
The Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) is one of the twenty largest school districts in the nation. Located in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, WCPSS consists of more than153 schools, serving over 136,000 students and 17,000 employees.

The Challenge
WCPSS’s challenge primarily focused on ensuring privacy protection of confidential information. Each one of the district’s thousands of students and employees has a confidential file that must be maintained, in compliance with privacy laws, as well as shared with only the proper personnel.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) requires that educators carefully control information they maintain pertaining to student’s home life, grades, and behavior. School administrators are also required to run background checks on all school employees and maintain these files for their records.

Despite the fact that both student, and employee, records contained sensitive information that needed to be sent securely, regulatory compliance was a large challenge. Users were often routinely sending student records, grade information, and discipline reports via email. Employee background checks were also being transmitted by unsecured email transmissions. WCPSS’s IT department needed to provide users with an alternative, compliant, and secure method to email attachments.

The Solution
BDS is a clientless, Web-based secure file transfer solution that enables enterprise-class secure file transfer. Data transfer is secure, authenticated, and delivered directly from point-to-point. Integrated tracking and reporting capabilities provide a comprehensive audit trail.

BDS lets the Wake County public school system’s employees easily send and receive files using 128-bit encryption - all from a simple, Web-based interface. BDS is a simple and effective way for hundreds of users to send and receive sensitive or large files both within the organization and to external contacts.

Ease of use was a key factor in the decision to implement BDS. “It’s very intuitive,” says Mr. Johnson. “We don’t have to explain much to people and it doesn’t take much for them to grasp how to use it. We were initially only planning to roll it out to our administrative group as a test application, but as we got used to it we really liked it! Now we’re planning to scale up our implementation and expand it beyond our legal, administrative and facilities organizations.” BDS is currently being used by hundreds of WCPSS employees and Mr. Johnson plans to roll it out to all school employees in the near future: “We’re performing several dozen secure transactions each week and in the future we’ll have an un-guessable number of transactions.”

About Biscom, Inc.
Biscom was founded in 1986 and pioneered the fax server marketplace, providing many of the world's largest organizations with its award-winning FAXCOM fax servers. In addition to enterprise fax server products, Biscom also offers hosted fax services, secure file transfer and messaging solutions, file conversion software, and document workflow and automation tools. The company is headquartered in Chelmsford, Massachusetts.