If you’ve ever put the words “enterprise”, “file”, and “transfer” together in your mind, in that order, then it’s very possible that you were thinking about one or more of the following: in the context of “enterprise file transfer”:
- The way that files move into and out of your enterprise from business partners and customers, both user-driven and system-driven
- The way that files move around within your enterprise – from corporate to branch locations or between geographically distant departments
- The reality that FTP is failing in so many environments throughout the enterprise, for security or reliability reasons – surely there’s a better approach to automating, securing, and hardening those file transfers.
- You have enterprise computing platforms that need to share bulk data with other internal applications, and you need a reliable way to schedule and execute that bulk data movement.
Now the reasons you might be conceptualizing enterprise file transfer vary. Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?
- You’re looking for a repeatable, consistent, streamlined process for supporting requests for external file transfers that supports the varied requirements of your entire enterprise.
- You’re struggling with sharing large files internally between geographically distant locations, perhaps between engineering or development teams. Or maybe you’re looking for a reliable, “fire-and-forget” method for moving files between the corporate data center and branch sites.
- Your in-house solution, built on FTP and originally scoped for departmental use, has taken on a life of its own and is bowing under the weight of enterprise requirements and modern data security expectations.
- Your developers need to spend less time coding and troubleshooting file transfers within their applications and instead focus on the customer-facing elements of those applications.
Enterprise-class managed file transfer solutions provide the range of capabilities needed for enterprise file transfer use cases. They provide an infrastructure that offers a range of benefits like the following:
- An intuitive and repeatable method for defining external file transfers and provisioning those transfers to new and existing business partners.
- Reliable system-to-system file transfer that detects and gracefully recovers from errors, and is designed for your enterprise platforms, such as IBM mainframes, IBM midrange, Microsoft Windows servers, and UNIX servers.
- A focus on automation that simplifies the execution of file transfers by system administrators and application developers. Imagine a file transfer service that is easy to utilize and just takes care of the important elements of security, error recovery, notifications, alerting, and starting the post-processing of files when they arrive at their destination.
- An equal focus on user-driven file transfer that streamlines the process of sending a file to another user internally or externally, especially files too large for email.
What this means to your organization is that your administrators, developers, and users are less focused on the setup and execution of file transfers, and instead are benefitting from the results of reliable, secure and on-demand data exchange.
If you’re looking to learn more about managed file transfer, Attachmate offers access to a number of third party research assets on this page. If you are interested in learning more about how Attachmate delivers the technology to support the infrastructure discussed above, you can read about Attachmate FileXpress, our enterprise file transfer solution.
