Case Study - Cimarex Energy
When Cimarex Energy chose Kiteworks to share sensitive research with partners, they protected valuable IP and reduced their SharePoint spend.
Cimarex Energy Securely Shares Large, Proprietary Data Sets Externally and Reduces IT Costs by 20%
Cimarex Energy is an independent oil and gas exploration and production company with primary operations in the Mid-Continent, Permian Basin, and Gulf Coast oil areas of the U.S. With an extensive roster of geoscientists and exploration teams, Cimarex is focused on assessing and generating drilling prospects and programs—determining which reserves will deliver optimized production rates and a strong return on investment.
Cimarex employees are in constant contact with external stakeholders such as land and well owners. They regularly share large documents that contain sensitive data—financial, tax, and other personal information. In addition, the company works closely with graduate students at local universities who conduct ongoing research for exploration projects, collaborating on sensitive findings related to simulation flows, seismic data, and mapping documentation.
“As an IT person, if I can save time—and money—it’s the ideal combination. Kiteworks has improved how we communicate and reduced our costs, proving its worth and then some.”
– Rey Mirabal, Network Systems Engineer, Cimarex Energy
Seeking a Scalable Collaboration Solution
To handle daily communication exchanges with the company’s key external audiences, Cimarex originally deployed two different vendor offerings—Kiteworks and Microsoft SharePoint. Kiteworks was originally implemented as a more secure and user-friendly alternative to File Transfer Protocol (FTP) services, giving employees the freedom to share documents larger than 20 megabytes, while offloading large files from the company’s email system.
SharePoint was utilized for collaboration and document sharing with students, but was considered a convenient, short-term solution. The product’s licensing structure did not support Cimarex’s business operations, as the company could not predict the number of student users from year to year, resulting in significant price swings.
Ultimately, Cimarex wanted to make it as easy as possible for employees to collaborate internally and externally, while ensuring the solution of choice could cost-effectively support unlimited users, while also easing the IT burden with minimal administration. “We needed simplicity without compromising function,” explains Rey Mirabal, network systems engineer for Cimarex. “Our users were already familiar with Kiteworks as a large file transfer solution, so it was a natural progression to choose Kiteworks’ secure file sharing capabilities for all of our collaboration needs.”
Case Study
Cimarex Energy Securely Shares Large, Proprietary Data Sets Externally and Reduces IT Costs by 20%
Optimizing Collaboration Across the Organization
Cimarex conducted a two-month trial of Kiteworks’ secure file sharing capabilities, initially utilizing it for its work with students from the University of Oklahoma. Cimarex deployed Kiteworks in its existing VMware virtual environment, providing the flexibility to scale as the company’s needs evolve, enabling collaboration with any number of student users. Cimarex employees create secure folders for research to be reviewed, shared, and revised, giving graduate students and staff a central place to collaborate on current exploration projects.
Due to the positive feedback from Cimarex employees, the company decided to deploy Kiteworks for use across all four office locations. Today, each university program has its own workspace, with an individual Cimarex employee acting as the administrator, relying on Kiteworks’ intuitive end-user application to determine who has posting privileges and viewing rights.
Cimarex’s legal department and other staff members have since adopted Kiteworks’ secure file sharing capabilities, using the platform to share sensitive, data-intensive 100GB+ files. With Kiteworks’ LDAP integration, Cimarex employees are automatically validated with existing network accounts and passwords, adding to the platform’s user-friendly experience.
Realizing Bottom-line Benefits
Ensuring that workspaces are not visible to everyone is a critical security and compliance requirement for Cimarex’s university partners, as much of the research contains proprietary information. “Kiteworks provides our partners with the peace of mind that their confidential files remain confidential,” Mirabal relates. “We can now send, receive, and share information in a highly secure and safe environment and it’s a part of how we do business every day.”
But Kiteworks’ value proposition goes far beyond security. Its scalability has translated to significant cost savings, reducing the company’s annual IT spend by more than 20 percent as a result of migrating from SharePoint. “As an IT person, if I can save time—and money—it’s the ideal combination,” says Mirabal. “Kiteworks has improved how we communicate and reduced our costs, proving its worth and then some.”
Needs
- Enable secure file sharing to enhance secure collaboration with university partners
- Avoid the high cost of scaling licenses up and down with Microsoft SharePoint
Kiteworks Solution
- Kiteworks content firewall platform for secure file sharing, email, and collaboration
Business Impact
- 20%+ reduction in IT spend by eliminating SharePoint license and storage costs
- Proven security and compliance for keeping proprietary information confidential
