What is MFT and Why do Businesses need it?

Managed File Transfer (MFT) is a software-based solution that allows businesses to securely exchange large and sensitive files both internally and externally. MFT provides a secure, reliable, and auditable way of transferring files, which is particularly important for organizations that deal with sensitive data such as financial institutions, healthcare providers, and government agencies.

MFT solutions typically include features such as encryption, authentication, and access controls to ensure that files are securely transmitted and received. They also provide tracking and auditing capabilities, enabling businesses to monitor file transfers and ensure compliance with regulations and policies.

MFT solutions can be implemented on-premises, in the cloud, or through a hybrid approach, depending on the organization’s specific requirements. They can also integrate with other systems and applications, such as enterprise content management systems and workflow automation tools, to streamline business processes and improve efficiency.

Overall, managed file transfer is an essential tool for businesses that need to transfer large amounts of data securely and efficiently, while also meeting compliance and regulatory requirements.

Situation: Inefficiency, Expense and Non-Compliance

Job Scheduling: Heterogeneous Inefficiency

Most enterprises implement multiple job scheduling solutions depending on platform type, application, data center and business owner. Aside from standards like cron, at, SAP’s, CCMS, i5/OS Advanced Job Scheduler, Oracle’s DMBS_Scheduler, HP’s Netbatch for NonStop servers, and others, more than 30 vendors add job scheduling solutions to the enterprise mix. While a diverse mix of job scheduling software may address the needs of individual business owners, that same mix presents a barrier to consolidated job scheduling.

File Transfer: Exorbitant Pricing and Non-Compliant Adoption

Despite growing budget constraints, many organizations cling to expensive enterprise-class file transfer solutions – some requiring dedicated connections. Often, the file transfer software is so costly that an organization deploys it only sparingly, allowing internal users to initiate FTP – a serious issue of audit compliance. Although there are a great many solutions for B2B communications security, MFT satisfies basic needs with minimal complexity. Simply put, MFT solutions are frequently overpriced.

Learn more. Read the white paper.

What Causes A Disparate Job Scheduling Environment?

While I have touched on the causes of a complex and disparate job scheduling environment in past posts, let’s take a more in-depth look at some of leading causes:

1. Acquisitions  – For many companies that integrate acquisitions, consolidating IT tools such as scheduling is not their highest priority. Although, it will save money in the long run, it is a big project that poses risks. Consequently, scheduling staff members are burdened with managing multiple schedulers.
2. Departmental Purchasing – The lack of centralized purchasing or company-wide standards often results in the independent departmental acquisition of different job scheduling solutions that are unable to interoperate with each other and existing tools.
3. Access to Tools – Application departments circumvent standard tools and use easier scheduling tools such as Cron. It is simple and easy to set up a Cron tab or schedule a process in Windows, but it is only a quick fix. Moreover, these one-off fixes decrease overall business visibility.
4. Built-in application capabilities: This is one of the biggest culprits. Companies deploy applications and tools, such as backup products, due to the perceived benefits of a self-contained system that can be managed by its own tools. This thinking ignores the fact that most applications are not self-contained. In fact, they “touch” other applications by exchanging data and have dependencies based on the overall business workflow. Implementing these “point” solutions prevents the ability to control business workflows from end-to-end.
5. Lack of management mandate – Without clear mandates from senior management, there is no ability to enforce centralized control. Thus, departments and application developers will take the path of least resistance.

In many cases, sooner or later, IT operations inherit these different applications and tools and are stuck with managing them. With vendor-independent technology, IT organizations can avoid these pitfalls, while saving money, time and resources.

Are Your Employees Following Security Policies?

In the Ponemon Institute’s study, “Trends in Insider Compliance with Data Security Policies,” a majority of respondents admit to serious non-compliant workplace behaviors that place their companies at risk. Such behaviors include the insecure use of USB memory sticks, Web-based email, social media, mobile devices and more. What’s more, the problem seems to be getting worse. The report sites lost or missing USB memory sticks and other portable data-bearing devices that often not reported to the company or are reported when it is too late.

Two key findings?

• Employee attitudes about their employees affect the level of compliant vs. non-compliant behavior.
• Employees do not believe their organizations provide ample training or adequate policies to inform them about data protection and security practices.

So, how does your company stack up against the percentages? 61 percent of end users transfer confidential data onto a USB stick and 71 percent says that others do it. What if there was a way to easily transfer sensitive, proprietary and confidential company and client information without using the number 1 cause of lost data? A secure, ad hoc Managed File Transfer solution can let your employees send up to 2GB of confidential information of files without even leaving their email client. No training, no ramp-up time and the ability to track messages and files. Sound too good to be true? Learn more.

Managed File Transfer: Preventing Healthcare Identity Theft

In a recent report by the Smart Card Alliance entitled, “Medical Identity Theft in Healthcare,” the study sites that, “Further evidence of the significance of the medical fraud problem is the allocation of $1.7 billion for fraud detection in the 2011 U.S. Health and Human Services budget.” In 2009 alone, 68 reported healthcare data breaches in the U.S. put over 11.3 million patient records at risk according to the Identity Theft and Resource Center (ITRC).

Paper records are no longer acceptable for your organization.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and the associated provisions under the Health Information Technology  for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH),  have highlighted the need to address security and privacy across our healthcare system.

The report goes on to state that “the way to stop medical identity theft confusion is to improve patient identification and provide enhanced data production through strong authentication and encryption.” How can a healthcare organization achieve this? B2B Managed File Transfer. Protection of patient information does not happen just inside the four walls of your organization. Think of the providers, health record banks, health insurance and hospital Web portals.

The key is two-factor authentication and data encryption. Are you employing these security methodologies at your organization?

Securing Your Customers’ Data

Can you guarantee the security of customer and company information with today’s available communication tools?

As a business professional, there are a number of tools from which to choose for communication and collaboration. It would be impossible to conduct business everyday without email. Additionally, you use solutions such as FTP to send large files to colleagues, business partners and clients. In a hurry, you may use expensive, expedited shipping services or a courier for your confidential and proprietary documents.

While there are many forms of communication, do you have 100 percent confidence that the content of the message or file being exchanged is secure? While these services, “get the job done” in most cases, they ineffective, costly and provide no guarantee that your documents will arrive securely or on time. So how can you transfer messages and files securely, instantly and a reasonable price?

A secure business communications solution can be used to exchange information or files quickly and securely inside and outside of your organization. As easy-to-use as email, a secure business communications solution, enables you to send important, confidential or proprietary information instantly. Just type a message or attach a file and click to send.

Learn more.

What Data Are Your Employees Sending Out?

Business communications today is a complex issue for most organizations. With so many tools, whether its email, mobile apps or FTP, it is difficult for users to know the most effective solution for sending confidential or proprietary information. From an information security standpoint, these data exchange solutions are insecure, ineffective and can potentially cause data breaches within your organization.

As an IT manager, are you constantly concerned with how and what information your employees are exchanging  within and outside your organization? With a secure business communications solution, you gain visibility and control over your organization’s business communications with process status, exceptions and transactions and trends. Additionally, deploying via SaaS provides an affordable cost of ownership and quick return on investment due to ease of use and quick implementation.

Finally, providing your business users with a way to communicate securely and seamlessly without disrupting their daily activities enables you to relax knowing they aren’t circumventing IT by uses one-off, insecure communication methods to get their job done.

Do you know how your users send out confidential or sensitive information?

Technology Independent Scheduling Agents: Part Two

Besides minimizing risk and costs, vendor-independent technology enables you to simplify your IT infrastructure by standardizing processes to execute workload automation anywhere in the environment. Moreover, if business requirements dictate a new workload tool, the standard process is transportable, saving your original investment in configuration, training and deployment. This is all accomplished without getting locked in to a single vendor, which has negative implications for both price and functionality.

For example, assume you have two schedulers and each has its own proprietary agent technology. These schedulers each need to run processes across shared systems. Without vendor-independent technology, this would require a proprietary agent from each of the two schedulers installed on each of the systems, which not only creates significant cost but also  causes complexity for scheduling and operations staff. Vendor-independent technology can speak to each of these systems, requiring only one agent, while receiving processing requests from the two schedulers. This significantly simplifies the communication in your job scheduling environment.

By using vendor-independent technology, there is no need to retrain employees on new schedulers. You can re-use your existing technology investments in software, processes and skill sets, while simplifying your environment. You gain control over your job scheduling infrastructure while providing greater visibility in your production environment.

Job Scheduling Agents at a Reasonable Cost: Feed Your Piggy Bank

Are expensive scheduling agents preventing you from meeting you Job Scheduling requirements?

Replacing or even acquiring additional legacy scheduling agents is a costly, daunting and resource-draining task. Vendor-independent technology enables you to avoid these risks while streamlining, optimizing and modernizing your Job Scheduling environment without replacing a single agent. Not to mention you can add agents to meet your growing requirements at the fraction of the cost of purchasing additional agents from existing scheduling vendor. All of which significantly reduces cost and increases your return on investment.

Are you throwing money away with legacy scheduler agents?

Vendor-independent technology works alongside your existing schedulers and provides you with one single point of management and control for your entire environment. No matter what the scheduling tool, every agent can be controlled and monitored from one central location, providing visibility across your entire workflow. Vendor-independent technology allows you to execute programs outside of Job Scheduling, making it more than just a scheduling agent; it’s an automation tool.

Costs can increase because your scheduling vendor bases agent cost on multiple CPUs. With technology-independent technology, whether it’s one CPU or 20, the cost remains the same. You are not locked down by a particular vendor, platform or scheduling system. You gain value and additional functionality at a reasonable price that is not offered by Job Scheduling vendors.

Platform-Specific Vs. Technology Independent: A Scheduler or a Agent?

The key to solving both IT and business issues is to simplify and complement your existing job schedulers by deploying vendor-independent technology across the enterprise. This technology enables you to integrate with your existing schedulers and provides a more comprehensive view of your IT infrastructure.  Vendor-independent technology enables people to work across platforms without specialization, standardizing processes and consolidating tools, improving IT maturity while significantly reducing hard and soft costs.

A simplified job scheduling environment using vendor-independent technology.

For example, suppose Scheduler A needs to communicate with three different backend applications. The cost of purchasing agents for those backend applications from Vendor A is cost prohibitive. Consequently, IT decides to use vendor-independent technology to complement the existing scheduler, enabling Scheduler A to communicate with all three backend applications at a much lower cost.

A key benefit to this approach is that you can leverage your existing investment in Scheduler A at reduced risk, cost and effort. Additionally, vendor-independent technology increases your business’s ability to support emerging technologies such as service-oriented architecture and other Web-based technologies.