No matter the size of an organization, files are constantly in motion between  employees,  servers, and applications; both internally and in exchanges with business partners and customers. File transfer is part of the day-to-day operations on which an organization depends. Because file transfer is so pervasive and vital, organizations that investigate managed file transfer solutions often look to recognize value in three key areas:

• Cost control – Unification of technology and process that minimizes the recurring costs of developing, provisioning, securing, troubleshooting and reporting on file transfers.
• Governance and Data Security – Applying security policy and auditing to internal and external file exchanges between users, between systems, and between applications.
• Application Integration – Both the reliable movement of bulk data between applications and the facility by which secure and supportable file transfer is consumed within applications by application developers.

One or more of these managed file transfer topics may resonate with you, causing you to want to learn more.  That is why Realtime Publishers and technology author Dan Sullivan recently developed three articles that can help educate IT professionals on these key value drivers for managed file transfer. The Essentials Series titled, “Controlling Costs, Improving Compliance, and Streamlining Integration with Managed File Transfer,” is an excellent resource for those evaluating managed file transfer solutions for their operation.

The three articles, each focused on a specific value driver, are available on the Attachmate website at no cost:

• Article 1: File Transfers Cost You More Than You Realize—What to Do About It
• Article 2: Managing File Transfer and Improving Compliance
• Article 3: Improving Application Integration with Managed File Transfer

Realtime Publishers’ synopsis of this Essentials Series nicely sets up these articles.

Data is constantly moving through organizations to business partners and into the cloud. Businesses depend on file transfer methods for day-to-day operations as well as for longer-term planning and analysis. Although file transfers might sound like simple operations, they are not. Network connections fail, data packets are dropped, disks become full, and, perhaps worst of all, ad hoc scripts might not provide adequate error handling and reporting to help you troubleshoot such problems. This Essentials Series outlines the business drivers for using managed file transfer solutions and shows how to improve compliance and application integration while controlling costs.

You can access this Essentials Series here.  

If reading these articles leads you to want to learn more about managed file transfer, then check out the newly-revised Shortcut Guide eBook or any of the other educational resources available at Attachmate’s website.

3 Key Value Drivers for Managed File Transfer is a post from: Data In Motion - a Managed File Transfer blog

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We’re often forced to choose between expediency and repeatability.  When a business department contacts IT at 4:30pm on Friday afternoon and wants to find a way to provide a large file to a new contractor, “right now” probably seems more important than “right.”  As a result, IT may be forced to come up with a way to make the file available that ranks great on responsiveness to business needs, but low on security, repeatability and scalability should another or multiple similar requests come in.

At some point, you may decide that the frequency and urgency of these one-off business file transfer requests has hit the threshold necessary to stop reinventing the wheel again and again, and to bring together the right combination of technology, process, and people to create a more permanent, efficient and repeatable solution.

When you reach that point, you may wish to factor in the following considerations: 

6 key considerations when planning a business file transfer solution

1. File Transfer Direction and Initiation

Are you sending files with your partner/customer and receiving files from them?  Who will initiate the file transfers: your partner/customer, your organization, both? 

Put another way, which boxes in this grid should get a checkmark?

 Other considerations within this category are:

• Do you have existing business requirements that require you to be able to connect to other business partner’s servers to either deposit or retrieve a file?
• Do you need a way to manage both processes and have a single audit trail to track all transactions?

2. File Origin and Target Locations

What is the original or ultimate destination of the data you need to exchange with your business partners?  Often the actual moving of the data from the source server into the business file transfer system is considered outside the scope of the solution, as is the final movement of the file into its ultimate target system.  It’s important to realize that a file transfer from sender to final location does not have to be considered a collection of isolated individual steps.  That kind of design causes complexity and creates difficult to follow audit trails.  It is also important to understand how your solution ties in with backend systems and what operating systems need to be supported on the backend.

3. Post Transfer File Processing

What processing is required on the data once received? The moving of the file is only one part of the business file transfer need.  Often, the data that is received needs to be processed in order to complete the necessary business transaction.  This requires the system to be able to automatically kick off business processes once the data is moved to the appropriate system.  What are your organization’s needs in this area?

4. File Transfer Automation

Consider the level of automation that is needed? Will your staff still need to babysit critical file transfers, or can you take that manual effort out of the loop?  Many file transfer technologies support simply a command line interface, requiring users to write complex scripts.  Others offer advanced levels of automation, including event driven transfers whereupon the modification or creation of a file in a given location on the system can automatically trigger the movement of that file to a predetermined location.  Each project is different, so it is important that you understand your project needs and the required levels of automation.

 5. File Transfer Protocols

There are a wide variety of protocols available for use in Internet-based B2B communications.  What protocols work best for your business?  The most common of the protocols used are FTP, FTPS (FTP/SSL), SFTP (SSH/FTP), HTTPS (HTTP/SSL), HTTP and AS2.

6. File Sizes

You need to evaluate what size files you are likely to transfer, both today and in the future.  Many applications have limitations as to file size and often those limits will change depending on the protocol in use.  When considering file transfer technology, be sure to determine what, if any, file size limitations exist for each of the protocols you plan to use.

Technology,  process, and people 

These considerations all inform the technology, process, and people components of solving your business file transfer repeatability and scalability challenges.  Managed File Transfer tools, such as Attachmate’s FileXpress, address the technology components of your solution, while enabling a more efficient process that is practical for the people involved.  As a result, Managed File Transfer will help you achieve “right and right now” business file transfer.

Business file transfer…do it right now, or do it right? is a post from: Data In Motion - a Managed File Transfer blog

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Are you the conqueror of your IT department?  Are you looking for a challenge to knock off your to do list? Well look no farther than the file transfers that go on in your organization and become the hero.  Chances are that you’ll run into one of these issues:

• There is no efficient and repeatable process for enabling new external file transfers with business partners or clients
• There are too many file transfer solutions in your organization all doing the same job
• Your users frequently develop the need to send large files at unpredictable times
• Automating file transfers in scripts and applications is complex and time-consuming

Here is how FileXpress, Attachmate’s managed file transfer solution, can help you be a conqueror, driving security, efficiency and cost-effectiveness into the internal and external data movement performed by your organization every day.

6 Ways that FileXpress technology helps you be a Conqueror

FileXpress helps you:

1. Build a repeatable process:

Don’t reinvent the wheel every time that a business team comes to you and asks for the ability to transfer files outside of the company.  FileXpress provides the ability to securely exchange files over the Internet with business partners and customers, while supporting a consistent, reusable, and efficient process for provisioning and file routing.

2. Consolidate file transfer solutions:

Take a look at how many file transfer solutions your organization has acquired over the years. For each solution, that’s one set of products to learn, one set of troubleshooting tools to figure out, one scripting language to familiarize yourself with, one vendor relationship to maintain…and so on.  Attachmate FileXpress offers the functionality, data security, scalability, and breadth of platform support to allow you to consolidate multiple disparate file transfer solutions into one.

3. Empower your users and reduce the burden on IT:

When your users suddenly develop the need to send a large file to someone else, inside or outside of the organization, do they have to come to you? Do email attachment size limits or inbox space limitations drive up the number of IT helpdesk calls? With FileXpress, users can securely send files of any size to other users, when they need to, without filling up their email storage space.  This means that you get to step out of that loop, and users still get their jobs done.  You both win.

4. Enable your developers and systems administrators:

File transfer is such a foundational activity.  Your developers and system administrators therefore, should have access to powerful file transfer services that deliver reliability, security and supportability. FileXpress provides the file transfer APIs that developers and scripters need to automate file transfers.

5. Simplify automation:

Implementing traditional file transfer technologies well is complex. Key capabilities such as error alerting, event-driven automation, and triggering on a successful transfer all have to be scripted or developed outside of the file transfer APIs. FileXpress builds these capabilities right into the file transfer definitions so that developers and sys admins don’t have to write and maintain those important functions themselves.  You get to offer your valuable development staff tools that save them time and improve reliability and supportability.

6. Quickly discover problems:

The need to effectively resolve problems spans all file transfer use cases.  Whether a file transfer is run via a job scheduler, called within a custom application, or executed manually by a user at their desk, when a problem occurs, someone needs to hear about it before it becomes a bigger problem. When a problem arises, FileXpress alerts you of the error, and records the details necessary to identify the source of the problem and resolve it. As a result, you discover problems before your customers, and have the information you need to solve them quickly.

It’s your grit and determination that helps you conquer the challenges each day brings…but it doesn’t hurt to have some useful tools in your utility belt.  Take a deeper look at how FileXpress helps you go about your daily conquest and can make you the hero.

6 Ways FileXpress MFT Technology Delivers File Transfer Solutions is a post from: Data In Motion - a Managed File Transfer blog

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In the last post we looked at key use cases for server-to-server file transfer, where existing solutions tend to fall down, and the evolving requirements that support IT’s need to both maintain a reliable data infrastructure and respond quickly to new business initiatives.

In this post, we’ll look briefly at the modern technology in managed file transfer solutions that drive the ability to meet those evolving requirements.

Underlying the MFT solutions that support reliable and automated point-to-point transfers between servers are a core set of capabilities that are missing in older file transfer technologies.  These are:

• Success Notification: The ability to know definitively that a file has successfully completed a transfer, and when.
• Failure alerts with details: If a problem occurs that interrupts the transfer, when it happens, and what the root cause is likely to be.
• Declarative Automation:  A configuration-driven method (versus complex scripting) for defining and executing file transfers and the associated steps of initiating a transfer, error recovery, and post-processing of the files after they’re transferred.
• Post-processing Actions: The ability to identify commands, scripts, and batches that need to be run from the context of the target system (or the source) following a successful transfer.
• Event-driven initiation: The ability to monitor directories and initiate pre-processing activities and file transfers on the basis of a file showing up in those directories.

Some of these capabilities are often achieved by enhanced (and yes, proprietary) protocols that perform extra steps at the beginning and end of a file transfer.  These allow the transfer endpoints to negotiate the elements of the transfer up front (valid security credentials, target storage definition requirements, post-processing actions that will be run at the end of the transfer, etc.) and perform a handshake at the end of the transfer (Sender, “I sent XXXX bytes.” – Receiver, “Great because I received XXXX bytes.”  or Receiver, “Uh-oh, I only received XXXW bytes, better try again.”).

These capabilities are the building blocks then that are combined to drive real value in to mission-critical server-to-server file transfer scenarios.  Advanced MFT solutions (like Attachmate FileXpress) hit the key areas:

Reliability:

• Native platform support – Windows, UNIX, Linux , IBM i, IBM z/OS
• Error alerting – Send an email or an SNMP trap as soon as a problem occurs
• Error details – Information on the source and location of the error and whether it’s recoverable or not (i.e. insufficient disk space – recoverable, failed user authentication – unrecoverable)
• Automatic retries – Have the MFT software automatically reattempt a recoverable failed transfer after a prescribed waiting period.
• Recoverable work queues – Don’t lose file transfers in a system crash. After system recovery, automatically rebuild the list of file transfers that are queued up to execute.

 Simplified Automation:

• Initiation – The MFT software will start the file transfer process as soon as a user, or script, or application drops a file into a monitored directory
• After the Transfer – The MFT software on the end points will kick off the next step of the process after the transfer is finished.  No scripting or kludgy flag file techniques needed to determine that the transfer is finished.
• Reusability – Configuration-driven file transfer definitions that can be used as templates for future file transfers.

Putting it all together, with MFT solutions server-to-server file transfers become more dependable and automation becomes simpler and quicker to implement.  As such, MFT is helping IT organizations maintain a reliable data infrastructure and respond quickly to new business initiatives.

5 Capabilities Enhancing Server-to-Server File Transfer is a post from: Data In Motion - a Managed File Transfer blog

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Routine, scheduled and automated file transfers between servers occur in a wide range of use cases in just about every organization. In this post, we will begin a two part series and look at those use cases and the top five factors compelling enhanced server-to-server file transfer.

In the next blog post we will look at the technology requirements to improve server-to server file transfer.

The use cases for automated server-to-server file transfers include: 

• The movement of bulk/batch data from one application to another
• The deployment of web application updates from a staging system to production systems
• The transfer of end-of-day financial and/or inventory data from branch locations into systems hosted in the corporate data center

There are of course many additional uses in any organization.  These are simply some of the more common and generic examples.

5 Factors Impacting Server-to-Server File Transfer

Critical business functions are dependent on these file transfers working consistently, so a reliable and reusable framework for the movement of data between servers within an organization supports the key IT objectives of maintaining a reliable data infrastructure and responding quickly to new business initiatives. 

When server-to-server file transfers fail to support these objectives, it’s typically due to one or more of the 5 following factors: 

• Size/Volume Growth – File sizes and file transfer volumes have grown too a level that’s challenging for existing systems to handle reliably and efficiently.
• Too many solutions – There are a variety of disparate file transfer technologies implemented across the organization’s server-to-server file transfer use cases; there are too many different ways to do the same thing.
• Lack of file transfer governance– Aggregated auditing and reporting needs to be established for all sensitive or regulated data moving within the organization.  See this blog post on file transfer governance.
• High manual effort – Certain file transfers are too critical to leave unmonitored.  Existing technologies can’t provide the reliability and visibility to the critical transfers, requiring IT staff to babysit key transfers.
• Expensive Automation/Integration – The lack of ROI from the effort to automate critical server-to-server file transfers because existing technologies fail to do enough of the work needed for reliability, error recovery and post-transfer activity.  This means that you’re required to code this logic into your scripts and applications, increasing their complexity and making sustainability of those scripts/applications more challenging. 

3 Requirements for Enhanced Server-to-Server File Transfers

Managed File Transfer systems that are optimized for server-to-server file transfer use cases (not all are) support the following requirements that overcome these challenges. 

• Reliably accommodate large files and scale to large volumes.
• Provide a powerful and easy-to-consume interface for file transfer and administrative functions to system administrators and application developers.
• Deliver the visibility necessary to quickly resolve outages, audit the movement of sensitive files and generate reports that document compliance in your handling of regulated data. 

Supporting these requirements is essential in successful and secure server-to-server file transfers that maximize the value of automating routine but vital data transfer.

The next blog post delves into the technical capabilities of advanced MFT solutions that support the above requirements.

5 factors compelling enhanced server-to-server file transfer is a post from: Data In Motion - a Managed File Transfer blog

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Is your washing machine giving you signs that it's ready to be replaced? How about your processes for transferring files?

Before you decide it’s time for a new home appliance, there are usually signs that indicate it’s time to bring in the new and recycle the old. Your washer and dryer aren’t what they used to be. From funny noises, to clothes left stained and damp, the signs are hard to ignore. The same is true for developing a file transfer strategy. There are many indicators that illustrate the need for a new approach. We have highlighted three examples that showcase this need.  

1. The most classic symptom that indicates the need for a file transfer strategy is when you have a problem sending a large email attachment. If you are sending a large file to someone at another organization, you want to ensure that the document was received. But what if the attachment is too large for an email system? Even if the important file clears your email, it may not make it through the intended recipient’s email system and there is no way to know if the file was stalled. You need a reliable file transfer method that allows you to easily send even large files to other users.
2. Another indication that it is time for a file transfer strategy is when there is no standard for file transfers in the organization. If everyone is sending files in a different way, it is confusing and makes it difficult to integrate solutions.  A single transfer strategy could streamline the process across your organization, especially if you select a solution that is scalable and flexible to your growing business needs. Also, by investing in a single file transfer solution, you’ll help cut costs by dealing with fewer vendors and reducing the number of file transfer servers you use to move files into and out of the organization. 
3. Finally, if you are using non-secured file transfer protocols, your data is at risk. The information you are transferring could be compromised and there is no way to ensure compliance with corporate policy. This could have devastating consequences on an organization and illustrates the need for one, flexible file transfer strategy that can be used across an organization and ensures files are received and information is protected.

If you notice the need for a file transfer strategy across your organization, we would be happy to discuss the benefits of FileXpress. Please contact us here.

What led you to explore a file transfer strategy?

How You Know it is Time for a File Transfer Strategy is a post from: Data In Motion - a Managed File Transfer blog

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We talk a lot about the benefits of an MFT solution on the “Data in Motion” blog. But once you’ve identified the need for MFT, how do you go about selecting the best one? We thought it might be helpful to provide you with some research tools to utilize when evaluating your options and selecting the right MFT solution that meets your business needs.

Analyst firms that research managed file transfer include Aberdeen, Forrester, Gartner and IDC.  We have included reports published surrounding MFT that can help in your search. We’ve also provided links to helpful blogs and white papers that aid in your search.

 Third Party Research

• Gartner — What MFT Is, and How It Applies to You
• Attachmate is currently offering access to this report on our website at no charge
• Gartner– Use These Evaluation Criteria to Establish Your MFT Requirements
• Gartner — How to Distinguish and Choose Between MFT Solutions
• Forrester –Market Overview: Managed File Transfer Solutions

 Blogs

• Filetransferconsulting.com
• Managedfiletransfer.com

White Papers

• Streamlining Information Workflows with Managed File Transfers
• Controlling the Cost of File Transfers
• Securing Internet File Transfers
• Attachmate’s MFT eBook on eliminating insecure and unreliable file transfer

Discussion

• LinkedIn Managed File Transfer Group

Video

• Making File Transfer a Strategic IT Asset

Once you’ve had an opportunity to evaluate the options that are available, we are happy to discuss our FileXpress solution and how it can help you drive more security, visibility and governance in the way you move data inside and outside your organization. Contact us here.

Research Tools to Evaluate MFT Solutions is a post from: Data In Motion - a Managed File Transfer blog

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