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How a Center of Excellence Helps Better Govern Your MFT User Experience

In my last post, we talked about the benefits of consolidating over dividing for a data flow governance model. This is very important when it comes to technical aspects, but also from an organizational stand point. This is where the notion of a Center of Excellence, or ‘CoE,’ comes into play. In our context, this team will concentrate on how to lead the transformation from “plain Managed File Transfer (MFT)” to a Digital MFT.

With this article, we will discuss the reason to build a Center of Excellence and what is an appropriate scope of responsibilities.

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Forget About “Divide and Conquer,” Think “Consolidate to Control”!

Here it is, it’s just been announced on the market and the stocks are already going through the roof: your company is merging with GotBought Inc., one of your competitors, to become the number 1 in your industry. Congratulations!! After celebrating with a decent amount of champagne and petit four, you go back to your daily routine and let the excitement fade away. One morning, you are connecting to your favorite Managed File Transfer (MFT) administration UI and that’s when it hits you: you know for a fact that GotBought Inc. is not using the same solution as you.

Remember two years ago, when you tried to set up a bi-directional connection to share data between both your IT worlds (in hindsight, that should have tipped you off on what just happened, you missed your chance to make some money in the market). Their system was a little old: lack of some protocols like AS2, cumbersome to configure, and let’s not get started about data security! It’s clear that your technology choice was more tech-savvy and future-proof, and should be the one retained for all data transfers going forward. Great! But what’s next for the other system?

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The Key to Get Ready for MFT Self-Service

Let’s take a minute to think about your current process for new MFT data flow creation. I’m sure you have tried to optimize this process based on the corporate standard tools and your own technical skills. Most teams gladly share an Excel spreadsheet with some computed values in protected cells, a few data field validations, and some rudimentary MS Basic macros. This is the first step, but I’m sorry to say: this is so 1990s. Maybe you’re more 2000s, presenting a web application to collect the right information from your business? A few screens to click through, a few dozen (technical) fields to fill in… Well, at least you’re not receiving hundreds of spreadsheets a month, and you’ve have gotten rid of poor version control based on file name. Nice! Can you do better? Certainly! And it’s actually pretty easy if you rely on an MFT Services portfolio.

Why Develop an MFT Services Portfolio?

Despite your well-thought web application, you still have to face recurring business users’ complaints.

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6 Benefits of Adopting a Managed File Transfer (MFT) Solution

A Managed File Transfer solution to move large volumes of unstructured data, differs from a plain File Transfer tool, like the world-famous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client/server combination. It does this by offering technical capabilities that earned it the prefix “Managed.” These capabilities include:

  • Guaranteed delivery that leverages ‘retry’ and ‘resume’ options to ensure the successful delivery of files and recovery from failed transfers.
  • File integrity to certify that the file was not altered accidentally or voluntarily (think “man-in-the-middle”) during its transit.
  • Non-repudiation or the ability to prove that a file was sent by one party to another by using digital signatures for each participant.
  • Automation of file transfer-related activities and business processes, both pre- and post-transfer, and on success or error.
  • End-to-end reporting on file transfers. Notification of successful file transfers (acknowledgment) all the way to the sending business applications.
  • Global visibility and auditability on administrative (configuration) and runtime (transfer) operations.
  • End-to-end security for data-in-transit and at-rest, with support for PKI.

All these criteria are characteristics of a Managed File Transfer solution and represented the boxes that vendors had to check during a Request for Proposal (RFP) processes back in the early days. Over time, the technologies and industry requirements (especially around compliance and risk management) have evolved, putting more pressure on the MFT vendors to come up with new points of differentiation. Here are six of those benefits to keep in mind when adopting a digitalized Managed File Transfer solution.