Welocalize

Global collaboration is seamless and secure with Citrix

ShareFile enables Welocalize to securely collaborate with internal employees and external clients

We live in an integrated world economy where organizations cross geographical boundaries to interact with a wide range of people. Welocalize, a trusted global content transformation partner, helps more than 2,000 brands and companies reach, engage and grow international audiences by delivering multilingual content in over 250 languages.

A few years ago, the company began a large-scale digital transformation. This included a mandate to modernize their IT infrastructure and move their services from local, isolated file servers to the cloud. To meet their evolving business needs, Welocalize needed a flexible yet secure file sharing solution that facilitated internal and external collaboration. They chose the ShareFile solution due to the secure, reliable cloud service offering and partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Providing a reliable cloud service

Before turning to ShareFile, the company used 15 local file servers to share and store files. These resources were hard to access, reliant on small office infrastructure and required constant upgrades.  Moving to a managed, globally accessible cloud service for file management helped to improve cost savings and free up IT staff to focus on more value-driven activities.

“Using ShareFile not only removed the maintenance issues completely, but also removed the capital expenditure and hardware server costs and management year over year. Moving to ShareFile has saved us several hundred thousands of dollars per year in personnel and hardware costs,” explained Aaron Heber, VP, Global IT, Welocalize.

And transitioning to remote work during the pandemic was seamless due to their decision to shift to the cloud. “Within a span of two to three weeks, we were able to transition all of the workers from an office location to their homes seamlessly because of the cloud service model that we had been engaged in and building on, with ShareFile being one of the core services to that.” 

Supporting flexibility for a global workforce

With more than 2,100 employees working all over the world, flexibility was a top priority for Aaron’s team. They needed a solution that enabled them to store files in three key regions (Asia, Europe, and North America) with low latency and GDPR compliance.

“ShareFile matched their workflows and improved their ability to satisfy customers’ requirements for GDPR compliance in the European region,” mentioned Heber. “We can move files easily between each area within the Citrix system.”

It was equally important to find a solution that fits seamlessly into employees’ existing asset management and delivery workflow. ShareFile integrates easily with other cloud services and the API-based tools developed internally to help improve their workflow process.

Enabling secure collaboration internally and externally

Not only does ShareFile “check the box” with flexibility, but it also provides a level of security that’s hard to match. “We conducted extensive research on security requirements for various platforms and were very satisfied with ShareFile’s security offerings,” says Heber.

As part of their IT modernization initiative, Welocalize adopted a zero-trust security model for all devices. With Citrix’s native security settings, including granular access controls and single-sign-on from any device, ShareFile fulfills the company’s broad security requirements. It also puts security in the hands of the end-users with features like secure link sharing, link expiration functionality and authenticated access.

“File version control has been a critical component of us knowing that our files are protected. If an individual had their files compromised due to a ransomware event, we can roll those versions back up to 50-year or more versions,” noted Heber.

ShareFile also leverages industry-standard encryption to protect sensitive assets during ingestion, storage and delivery. This enables Welocalize to partner with customers in highly regulated industries while ensuring security and confidentiality. “We work with a lot of life sciences organizations, who have very heavy validation requirements. We were able to validate our ShareFile implementation because of the security the platform offers,” shared Heber.

Facilitates external sharing in a secure, virtual environment

To best serve their global customers, Welocalize has a network of over 250,000 linguists  working to translate, localize and adapt content to over 250 languages. “Most of our external workforce interacts with us through ShareFile,” says Heber.

With ShareFile, the company can unite all assets in one secure platform, driving productivity and simplifying the way internal and external workers collaborate. And as OneDrive users, employees can perform in-line editing and share files externally, easily and securely, with strict file permissions.

“We use the collaboration functionality extensively. Freelancers and vendors are critical to our business model, and the ability to share content easily and securely with strict permissioning is unbelievable. I can’t imagine trying to manually manage that within other platforms.”

With Welocalize’s broad freelance community, there is a lot of documentation to manage, including non-disclosure agreements (NDA) and service-level agreements (SLA) for each project. With the RightSignature integration, the talent community team can securely store, manage and send these documents to freelancers and agencies for electronic signature. They also use templates to create different categories of documents and to keep them consistent across every project.

“RightSignature saves our team time and effort. We can generate a link and share [a document] without downloading it or creating email attachments,” says Kiira Alessandra Hjert-Bernardi, Global Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition at Welocalize.

Looking Ahead

Welocalize is focused on further improving employees’ workflows with more integration and automation. ShareFile and RightSignature will play a major role in driving automation as the delivery mechanism for many of their tools. “Our plan is to do more via an API to reduce clicking and moving files manually,” shares Heber. By continuing to maximize ShareFile’s value, Welocalize employees and partners can deliver top-notch service to their customers, wherever they are, in a secure and efficient way.