From Overhaul to Overachievement: Absa’s MOVEit Partnership Scales Secure File Transfer to a Staggering 1.4 Million Per Day
Products:
MOVEitChallenge
Managing multiple legacy file transfer tools, including IBM Sterling and Broadcom XCOM, created complexity, inefficiency and high maintenance costs. Absa needed a secure, scalable and compliant solution in order to consolidate operations, reduce IT overhead and support future cloud migration.
Solution
- Replaced five legacy systems with a centralized Progress MOVEit environment
- Automated workflows grew from 500 to over 11,000 tasks across ten countries
- Integrated with AWS, mainframes and third-party systems for future scalability
Result
- Manual task setup time was cut by 75%, saving millions in operating costs
- The IT team managing file transfers dropped from 60 to 9, freeing resources for higher-value deliverables for our customers
- Daily transfers scaled from 30,000 to 1.4 million with zero performance issues
Full Story
Challenge
Absa managed multiple legacy file transfer tools, including IBM Sterling and Broadcom XCOM, which created complexity, inefficiency and high maintenance costs. They needed a secure, scalable and compliance-ready solution to consolidate operations and reduce IT overhead.
With MOVEit, we went from 60 people managing file transfers to just 9—it’s that efficient.
Otto Nel
Workload Scheduling & Automation at Absa
Solution
Absa replaced its fragmented ecosystem with a unified MOVEit platform, deploying MOVEit Transfer, MOVEit Automation and MOVEit Gateway across all regions and business units, covering a wide range of business processes including payments, reports, backups and call recordings. The MOVEit products now handle over 1.4 million file transfers daily, up from just 30,000 under the legacy setup.
Efficiency Through Automation
MOVEit Automation reduced the time needed to set up or modify transfer tasks from eight hours to as little as one or two. While a team of 60 specialists was required to manage daily operations under the previous setup running on IBM Sterling, that is now done by a team of just nine, freeing resources for higher-value work.
Security and Compliance Readiness by Design
MOVEit software helps to more easily meet strict banking and regional regulatory standards through encryption, authentication keys, audit trails and layered firewalls. Regular penetration tests and audits have shown no security issues since implementation.
Scalable, User-Friendly Platform
The MOVEit portfolio provides visibility and ease of use—key reasons why “people actually want to use it.” Absa’s operations now span 11 African countries with 11,000+ automated workflows.
Future-Ready for the Cloud
Absa is migrating workloads to AWS, confident in the flexibility of MOVEit to integrate with cloud storage (e.g., S3 buckets), mainframes and third-party systems. Absa is also exploring Progress® Automate MFT, cloud-native file transfer automation, giving early feedback to support product innovation.
Result
With MOVEit software as its enterprise file transfer backbone, Absa realised major operational, financial and strategic gains.
- Efficiency: Automation reduced manual setup time by 75%, saving millions in operating costs.
- Scalability: Daily transfers grew from 30,000 to 1.4 million, with zero performance issues.
- Cost savings: The IT team managing file transfers dropped from 60 to 9, freeing resources for higher-value deliverables for customers.
- Security and compliance: All operations now meet stringent banking standards, with full audit visibility and zero recorded breaches.
- User adoption and transparency: Business units now have self-service visibility into file transfers, reducing IT support requests and improving satisfaction.
- Future readiness: MOVEit software integrates seamlessly with cloud and hybrid environments, providing continuity as Absa modernises its infrastructure.
MOVEit gave us one unified, secure and scalable solution across Africa. We’ve cut costs, improved performance and gained visibility that makes IT and business users more productive.
Otto Nel
Workload Scheduling & Automation at Absa