10 MFT Considerations

Companies are struggling to harness the massive volumes of new data created every day from a multitude of new sources both internal and external to their organization. The objective is clear: Gain end-to-end visibility to what’s happening in and around the business, and determine new ways to improve operations while scaling technology to meet new business requirements. Whether companies embrace a big data model, or look to improve data workflows within the back and front-end of the business, the management of all forms of data requires a strong managed file transfer (MFT) component to their B2B integration strategy.

MFT certainly is not a new concept – it’s often considered an “old school” technology – but its newer forms are more critical than ever to enabling a wide range of information integration use cases required by new and shifting business needs. In fact, its fundamental capabilities of managing, controlling, and governing important business data flows may be more important now than ever given the explosion of digital data in the new millennium.

Unfortunately today, many companies are limited by legacy B2B integration and older and incomplete MFT solutions that may have been custom-built, requiring a high degree of maintenance or added expense for users with specialized skillsets. Additionally, some integration and MFT vendors have sunsetted some of their technology, ending critical support for the system (or charging exorbitant fortunes to maintain it), and stranding their customers with slow and unsecured data movement. Even outsourced solutions become costly and lack the control visibility over all data exchanges moving throughout their organization.

That’s not to say that these legacy or outsourced solutions don’t work. The fact is, they probably work quite well, which is why they are still in use. But these solutions deliver inefficient file movement that doesn’t meet current volumes, auditing, SLA, and reliability standards, leading to more manual efforts than a company can afford.

There likely won’t be a need, then, to rip and replace solutions that are proven to work, so long as they can easily connect, orchestrate, and track data movement. But with the digital data revolution driving increased volumes, expanding file sizes, varying formats, and growing security and compliance mandates, you have to consider your current and future needs and decide how much confidence you have in the incumbent MFT functionality carrying your business into the future.