Cognizant’s Workday Practice Accelerates Project Delivery with Files.com

Overview

From Fortune 500 rollouts to rapid mid-market deployments, Cognizant’s Workday practice manages large volumes of sensitive employee and financial data, exchanging it daily between consultants, client teams, and third-party systems. Given the stakes, Cognizant holds itself to a high bar on data security, compliance, and efficiency: airtight security, complete audit trails, and the agility to scale operations as the consultancy continues to expand.

Challenges

Cognizant’s Workday practice faced several challenges in managing its high-volume data exchanges:

• High-stakes data exchange. Every Workday implementation involves sharing sensitive payroll, compensation, and personally identifiable information (PII) files.
• Audit and compliance pressure. External auditors regularly reviewed MFT configurations, log retention policies, and IP whitelisting, requiring flawless, transparent reporting at all times. Any gap in compliance could derail project timelines and client satisfaction.
• Explosive user growth. The practice needed to provide secure access to over 1,300 consultants and client stakeholders, with usage varying from project to project. Cognizant needed a solution with elastic licensing that wouldn’t penalize them for growth.
• Integration complexity. Developers required API-level access for integrations with Workday and SIEM systems, plus low-risk sandbox environments for testing new automations, all without risking exposure of sensitive production data.
• Cost predictability. As the practice continued to scale globally, leadership needed a solution that provided multi-year budgeting clarity without the unpredictability of overage fees or hidden costs.

Solution

Cognizant selected Files.com as the foundation of its secure, cloud-native MFT platform. Files.com provided the right combination of scalability, security, and compliance for Cognizant’s requirements:

• Encrypted, role-based portals. Files.com lets consultants, clients, and internal teams securely exchange files via web, MFT, or automated API calls. This eliminates the need for VPNs or legacy servers and simplifies file-sharing operations.
• Granular, real-time auditing. Files.com’s granular audit logs stream directly into Cognizant’s AlienVault (LevelBlue) SIEM, providing real-time evidence for external audits and answering security questionnaires with a few clicks, reducing audit preparation time from days to minutes.
• Child sites and folder-level permissioning. Developers got zero-cost sandbox environments for testing Workday integrations, keeping production data secure and auditors satisfied. This feature allowed for safe experimentation and innovation without exposing sensitive information.

Results

With Files.com in place, Cognizant’s Workday practice saw significant improvements in operational efficiency, compliance, and scalability:

• Faster project launches. Consultants can provision secure data rooms for new client projects in a matter of hours, instead of days, accelerating Workday deployment timelines and boosting client satisfaction by delivering projects on time.
• Developer agility. Automation teams can iterate on integrations within isolated sandboxes, reducing the risk to production environments and speeding up the development of new integrations, which in turn accelerates the overall innovation cycle.

Conclusion

By standardizing on Files.com, Cognizant’s Workday practice has turned secure file exchange into a competitive advantage. Client data is handled with strict security controls, project timelines move faster, and costs stay predictable. Cloud-native security, granular audit capabilities, and elastic scalability give Cognizant room to meet growing client demand and scale operations without friction.

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