Is it time to modernize your FTP?

When was the last time you bought insurance? It’s one of those services you buy and hope never to use to its full extent.

But what happens if you need it and it’s not there? What if your apartment is flooded in a storm and all your furniture is ruined? You might have to spend thousands to replace everything.

While cutting-edge technologies like microservices, IoT and RPA get lots of press, behind the scenes, many critical transactions–contracts, confirmations, orders, and more–rely on an essential but less exciting tool: File transfer. In a data-driven world, file transfer is still an integral part of how businesses interact with partners, suppliers, and customers. And many of those file transfers are running on the original file transfer protocol, FTP, or its encrypted analog, FTPS.

But FTP was never designed to handle complex transactions with workflows that trigger additional actions, compliance requirements that include logging and reporting and security, and the massive increase in traffic. And that can put your business at risk.

Now think about this in the context of file transfers and security. How would the lack of “insurance” affect your revenue, reputation and business-critical missions in the case of a data breach?

While some organizations are still sticking to the status quo, the market is seeing a big shift from traditional protocols – such as FTP, HTTP, SFTP – to more secure and governed file transfer solutions that meet today’s market needs.

Security, reliability

And there’s a reason for that. With the rising cases of information breaches across different industries, and the rising cost of those, many organizations are beginning to see the need to adopt new, more secure, and reliable ways of quickly transferring data from point A to point B. This is even more important with the growth in the number of data sources.

According to Gartner: “By 2024, 75% of organizations will have deployed multiple data hubs to drive mission-critical data and analytics sharing and governance.”

There’s good news, too. With the growing number of iPaaS solutions on the market, it’s now easier and quicker than ever to introduce a new, advanced, and reliable managed file transfer solution to your organization.

Here’s a short and comprehensive list of the new requirements for managing file transfers:

1. Security & broad support for file transfer protocols. Your new MFT solution should be able to support all common file transfer protocols as well as bring new levels as security to file transfers such as protocol-level encryption and virus scanning support.
2. Event-driven transfers. Modern MFT platforms can trigger actions based on events as well as invoke services & APIs as post-processing actions. Leveraging these capabilities can enable you to create sophisticated responses so no deadlines are missed.
3. A proper MFT platform can spare your organization hours and hours of manual work by automating and scheduling file transfers. And these could automatically resume when interrupted – picking up from where they left off. No more time for busy work.
4. Look for a MFT with a user-friendly UI that is easy and simple to work with. MFT platforms should provide employees with easy and quick ways to transfer files so they don’t have to go back to the old-school email transfers or using external services that can put your data at risk.
5. Choose a platform that offers more than just MFT. Add integration to your “must-have” list of items when researching your next MFT solution.

Do your research

If you’re still reading, Software AG must be on your short list. Check out the new cloud-based MFT solution, webMethods.io MFT. webMethods.io MFT is an extension of the on-premises webMethods ActiveTransfer and brings Managed File Transfer to the cloud as part of the webMethods.io iPaaS.

With webMethods.io MFT, you can address all of the above industry requirements for a modern MFT solution in a single platform that provides integration, API management, B2B and MFT capabilities. Our subscription-based model won’t hurt your wallet and the ease of use of our iPaaS will speed up onboarding, time to market and value for a hassle-free file transfer future.

Care to know more? Click below. 

You should also know that Software AG was recently listed as a leader in the The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise iPaaS, Q4 2021. Please download a complimentary copy of the report here.