axway managed file transfer survival guide · 2020-01-01 · core mft product capabilities...

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White Paper

Axway Managed File Transfer Survival Guide

Part 3: Implement a Successful MFT Strategy in Incremental Phases

In the digital economy, more than a third of

all business-critical processes involve file

transfers. This reality presents an opportunity

to transform MFT into a powerful business

enabler that reduces costs and risk, improves

efficiency and agility, and opens the door to

new mobile, cloud and big data initiatives.

Table of Contents

How to Use This Guide 2

Developing a Phased Implementation Strategy That Works for Your Organization 3

Phase 1 — Build a Solid Business Case 4

Phase 2 — Initiate the Project 8

Phase 3 — Create the Project Blueprint 10

Phase 4 — Execute the Project Blueprint 12

Phase 5 — Test MFT Processes and Integrations 13

Phase 6 — Roll Out the Solution 14

Phase 7 — Provide Production Support 16

Phase 8 — Plan for Advanced Functionality 17

Phase 9 — Establish an Integration Center of Excellence 19

Axway 5 Suite for MFT Integration, Consolidation and Governance 21

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How to Use This Guide

Welcome to Implement a Successful MFT Strategy in Incremental Phases, Part 3 of the Axway Managed File Transfer Survival Guide. The Guide is divided into three easily digestible white papers designed to be on-point for your entire file transfer team — from the CIO to your solutions architects to your LOB managers.

Part 1: Assess Your Infrastructure. This white paper provides an overview of basic file-transfer challenges and technologies and the compelling reasons companies need true managed file transfer, versus FTP and other legacy methods. It also guides you through a comprehensive assessment of your current infrastructure so you can determine what MFT capabilities you have today, where your problem spots are, and what you can do to solve them.

Part 2: Design and Optimize for MFT. This white paper leads your team through a five-step design process for creating the ultimate MFT infrastructure, and includes detailed use cases and relevant ROI data. It builds on fundamentals established in Part 1, so we recommend you complete Part 1 before moving on to Part 2.

Part 3: Implement a Successful MFT Strategy in Incremental Phases. This white paper guides you through the different phases of incremental MFT implementation necessary to ensure a smooth transition to the world of high-end managed file transfer, from building a solid business case for the project, to product testing, to rollout and support.

To capitalize on the MFT opportunity, you need to align business requirements with file-flow definitions and establish a central MFT infrastructure for managing and securing the complete lifecycle for all file flows — across applications, with your partners and customers, to and from cloud and big data platforms, and between people using desktops and mobile devices.


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Developing a Phased Implementation Strategy that Works for Your Organization

Many people underestimate how much effort it takes to be successful with Managed File Transfer. It isn’t just a simple install-and-go solution; Managed File Transfer requires a solid implementation strategy that ensures your organization can get the most out of it.

The first two parts of this Survival Guide focused on collecting information, understanding the technology and business needs, and designing an MFT infrastructure tailored to meet the requirements of your organization. Now it’s time to take your design and refine it into a strategic asset. After all, MFT integrates key business processes, so doesn’t it make sense to have strategy behind it?

Implementing a full-blown MFT strategy can be disruptive, so it’s important to make people aware of the project and its impacts and benefits. You will need to get buy-in from key stakeholders and define how MFT fits into your long-term integration strategy. Most importantly, you will need to create an implementation strategy that works best for your organization.

Why Take a Phased Approach?

A phased approach to implementation allows you to invest incrementally, and gives you the flexibility to make adjustments as your business needs change. It will also help you:

� Show progress quickly � Show value quickly � Improve business processes � Iteratively update your MFT infrastructure as necessary

This diagram shows the phases of implementation. Each one is critical to establishing a successful MFT strategy.

As we walk through each phase, keep in mind that the last six are interconnected — your MFT implementation should evolve into an enterprise-wide MFT strategy, which in turn will evolve into best practices that will allow you to develop a Center of Excellence (also known as a Competency Center) in your organization.

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Phase 1 — Build a Solid Business Case

While it’s possible to move ahead without a business case, it will be more difficult to secure funding for your initial project. In contrast, building a solid business case up front will help you justify the investment for your first project and gain management support for future expansion.

A great business case doesn’t have to be 100 pages; it’s more important to be concise and define your organization’s specific needs. A well-articulated business case will help educate management and lines of business on the benefits of adopting and continuing to invest in a comprehensive MFT strategy.

At a minimum, your business case should address these high-level topics:

� Executive sponsor — This is a senior person (typically VP-level or higher) who understands the business impact of implementing (or not implementing) MFT technology and can obtain the necessary budget. The executive sponsor is critical for visibility and driving the project at higher levels of management. This person will also help mediate any disagreements and/or complications.

� Project funding and launch customer — Launch customer refers to the business and application owners involved in the initial MFT deployment. They support and can contribute budget and resources to the implementation.

� Capital expense or operating expense — Identify how the implementation will affect the business financially, including how it will help to reduce operating costs.

� Use cases and pain points — Outline the primary use cases and pain points the MFT implementation will help to solve. For example, will it prevent missed SLAs that affect the normal operation of the business?

� Future benefits — These items are the outcomes for the uses cases and how the implementation will address the pain points.

Tip: One approach to gaining support for an MFT strategy is to cite another project where the initial phase justified the value of the entire project.


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Tip: Many technology analyst firms provide information on MFT as a key part of an integration strategy. Look for analyst research reports to help you identify and quantify the benefits.

Core MFT Product Capabilities Checklist — What Should You Look For?

A key element of building the business case is product identification. This should have been part of your analysis in Part 1 and Part 2 of the Axway Managed File Transfer Survival Guide, but now is a good time to review your product evaluation and selection.

In addition to the advanced functionality described in Phase 8, your new MFT solution should deliver all the core capabilities required to support a successful long-term strategy. Make sure any product you select is:

Flexible, scalable and powerful

� Allows implementation based on naming conventions that reduce customization workloads for new data flows and on-boarding new partners

� Provides pre-built APIs for integration with existing applications and security frameworks

� Is service oriented, allowing file transfers to be triggered, managed and queried as a service

� Scales for high-performance environments and requirements and offers advanced file-transfer capabilities such as broadcast and collect

� Can move your largest files between systems or to/from partners with little to no latency

� Is both protocol- and platform-agnostic to accommodate growth and changing business requirements

� Expose flows to new applications through easy-to-consume APIs

Secure and manageable

� Includes a robust security framework with total process encryption, auditable logging of data and activity, logical naming of files across platforms, and an adaptable architecture for new security standards

� Provides policy-based encryption for systematic and ad hoc file transfers to ensure that human error does not cause a breach of confidential data

� Provides full visibility, control and audit capabilities

� Manage life cycles: certificates, file flows, components (patches, service packs)

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Mobile-friendly and cloud-aware

� Does not limit the users of the system to devices directly connected to the internal network

� Can take advantage of cloud services

Strategic and intelligent

� Allows you to manage and audit file transfers in the context of your business, such as tracking KPIs in real time and providing self-service capabilities to your customers

� Provides features such as a user-friendly interface; smart monitoring, management and alerting; system-wide change management; intelligent processing queue and bandwidth optimization; and advanced check-point restart

Complete and modular

� Allows you to pick and choose configurations that best meet your needs

� Supports all file-transfer methods — A2A, B2B, cloud, big data, mobile and desktop-to-desktop unstructured transfers, such as those sent over email

NOTE: Refer to Phase 8 — Plan for Advanced Functionality to ensure the

product(s) you select are future-proof and can meet the changing needs of your

organization. The last thing you want to do is start over after rolling out the

initial phase of your MFT solution.


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Project Team

If you haven’t already done so, this is the time to form an MFT project team. As with any major IT project, this functional team will need to take on deadline-driven tasks and meet regularly to discuss progress.

Here are the roles and responsibilities commonly involved in an MFT project:

Executive sponsor The person at the senior-management level who supports and sponsors the MFT initiative based on the business case

Project owner The person who has done the due diligence required to spearhead the project

Project manager The person who will create the project plan and make sure milestones are met

LOB managers The business leaders who own the business processes that will be impacted

Enterprise architect The person or team responsible for measuring the system-level impacts of the MFT project. It is critical to engage and gain EA buy-in for the project early on.

Decision makers All the staff that will make decisions on business process or technology migration

IT staff Owners of the systems directly and indirectly affected by the project

NOTE: Don’t forget about training. Identify the team that will be responsible for

the implementation of your MFT strategy and get them trained. Like any other

technology project, your resources will perform better when they are trained on

the technology. Don’t assume you’ll have a successful implementation without

proper training.

Phase 1 results: The output of Phase 1 is a formal business case and presentation to educate stakeholders on the value and impact of the MFT solution and, most impor-tantly, convince them that the required investment is worthwhile. It is important to understand that your goal for the business case is to justify a strategy — not just an MFT project.

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Phase 2 — Initiate the Project

As mentioned in Phase 1, we don’t recommend it, but you can opt to move to project initiation without first building a solid business case. If you take this approach, it is best to limit the scope of Phase 2 so you can ensure success, demonstrate the value of MFT to your audience and create support within your organization.

NOTE: While there are many benefits of a successful first project, one of the

least recognized is building the required skillsets internally for successful MFT

implementations going forward.

In Part 2 of the MFT Survival Guide (Step 5: Optimize your MFT strategy), the goal was to identify a good place to start your MFT project by looking at all of the different projects you will be managing. Take some time to go back to this data now and review your possible starting points. Remember, we suggest a “Goldilocks” approach for your first project — not too big, not too small, but just right. This way, you can be sure your first MFT project will have:

� Enough challenge to give you valuable experience � Enough visibility that people will take notice � Enough value that people will understand the benefits

Now it’s time to do a little more research. During the project initiation phase, the project team performs the due diligence required to establish a phased program plan and an estimate of project benefits and costs.

The following deliverables will provide an in-depth education regarding the potential of the proposed MFT solution and the deployment process.

Requirements Discovery and Assessment

The requirements can be broken down into two main categories: business requirements and technical requirements. The business requirements include things like service level agreements (SLAs), regulatory compliance and legal issues. The technical requirements include things like scheduling, transport protocols and integration needs. Requirements should be gathered from not only the stakeholders in the project but also the groups/departments/divisions impacted by the project.


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Project Scope and High-Level Plan

Use the business and technical requirements you identified to create a high-level project plan. When developing the plan, consider issues such as the business timelines (quarter end) and other project schedules. This is a best-effort assessment that is more detailed than the simple estimates identified earlier in the Survival Guide; your project scope needs to be detailed enough to justify it. Of course, before you ultimately sign off on the project plan, you will need to refine and formalize it into an actionable plan.

Stakeholder Contract

This may seem unnecessary when your clients are internal to the business, but the intent is to get some level of formal commitment from the group/department/division you will be working with. This will vary from company to company and may even vary from department to department, but it is important to have the stakeholders understand the importance of the project as well as the impact and timeline.

Preliminary Project Plan

Using the project scope as a guideline, you need to establish a more detailed project plan that includes constraints, milestones and, most importantly, the assumptions you have made. This detailed plan should establish a timeline that takes into account different calendar events that a high-level project scope typically does not consider. It is good practice to review this plan with stakeholders early in the creation process so they are aware of timing and can alert you to events and activities that might not have come up during project scoping. Formal sign-off of the project plan also helps ensure it is realistic.

Phase 2 results: Successful completion of Phase 2 establishes a mutual understanding of the project’s strategic goals, the components and capabilities of the solution, the deployment approach and timeline, and project team roles and responsibilities. This mutual understanding is a crucial first step to organizing a successful implementation.

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Phase 3 — Create the Project Blueprint

The goal of this phase is to quickly establish a master design and architecture blueprint that supports the long-term vision for the MFT solution. The following deliverables will provide detail and clarification and set the stage for execution of the blueprint in Phase 4.

Team Preparation

Start by clearly outlining the goal of the project for the extended team. This team should include members from the applications and business units that are impacted. A kickoff meeting that outlines the goals, benefits and the preliminary project plan helps set the stage for implementation.

Detailed Project Plan

Leveraging the preliminary project plan you created in Phase 2, you now need to dig deeper and create a detailed project plan. Make sure that timelines are realistic and ensure you have identified the appropriate dependencies. Like any other implementation project, milestones should be set and time built in for testing. This project plan will be your measuring stick for the implementation. If possible, leverage project management resources to help ensure that your plan is realistic and tracked efficiently.

NOTE: A project plan can be a “living document” that is updated as events

happen during the implementation. However, the initial version should be

archived and used as the baseline to identify how far the plan deviated

throughout implementation.

System Design Plans

Consider the system design plans as your requirements. They should contain the technical implementation requirements you identified in Phase 2. They should also note the business processes that will be impacted and who the key stakeholders are, so they can be contacted if clarification is needed.

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Critical Success Factors

How will success be measured? This is an important question and should not be limited to technical criteria. Based on the groundwork you have laid with external project stakeholders, define the critical success factors for all impacted applications and business processes.

Hand-off to Project Manager

When the project plan is finalized and signed off, it’s time to hand it off to the person who will manage the project. (In reality, this person will most likely be you.) Even though thorough project management checkpoints can be tedious, it is important to remain diligent, so you can continuously manage expectations and keep things on track.

Comprehensive Unit Testing

Testing is critical to the overall success of your MFT project, and it must be comprehensive. The unit testing should be mapped back to the system design plans and consist of positive- and negative-path testing. It is impossible to cover every situation that might happen, but a reasonable effort should be made to cover as many likely scenarios as possible.

Phase 3 results: At the end of Phase 3, you will have a detailed integration design and blueprint, and deep knowledge of the level and types of information that must be supplied to relevant applications.

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Phase 4 — Execute the Project Blueprint

The execution phase provides a forum for developing a common understanding of the relevant business processes, refining phase requirements, proposing solutions, and testing those solutions for accuracy and adequacy. The following steps move the project blueprint from the planning phase to the execution phase.

Software Installation and Configuration

This should be done in accordance with the detailed project plan and when it will cause the least disruption to the associated business processes. Make sure you are able to manage configuration centrally. Be aware that certain systems can only be worked on during certain periods, and make sure to coordinate with the appropriate system owners for this downtime.

Tailoring and/or Additional Programming

Address the integration and pre- and post-processing needs of each application. Leverage source-code control to manage versions as needed.

Data Preparation, Testing and Training Preparation

For this step:

� Prepare data that is as close to production as possible � Document unit and system tests required to validate the implementation and deployment — don’t forget to include positive- and negative-path testing

� Outline the testing plan and, if possible, meet with testing teams to go over the plan, address issues and answer questions

Tailoring Log and Management Documents

It is important to keep track of specific details performed when installing, configuring and deploying file-transfer definitions. Ideally, your tailoring log and management documents should be maintained centrally so they can be easily managed and reviewed.

Customer Acceptance Form

An MFT implementation affects many parts of an organization. Success is not just the technical implementation of the software and deployment of flows — it must also meet the business objectives of the application owners. To make sure everyone understands what success means for the project, have the business customers sign off on the implementation using a customer acceptance form.

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Phase 4 results: The successful completion of this phase depends on the project team using real data from real systems to execute use cases in a pilot instance of the application platform. This allows the team to: n Accurately assess data availability n Understand timing issues n Identify gaps in data and processes n Validate potential solutions before committing the resources required to build a production solution Testing in this phase is at the implementation level; this is not the same as comprehensive testing that ensures a specific point transfer is acting as expected. That will come in Phase 5 and Phase 6.

Phase 5 — Test MFT Processes and Integrations

In the testing phase, all MFT processes and integrations are configured, developed and tested at the business-unit level — including trading partner configurations, B2B services, file brokering, Web services, trading partner maps and business process flows. The business layer should be configured to present proper information to the right audience, as well as generate alerts and notifications to enable management-by-exception processes. Key deliverables of this phase include a test plan, reports and formal signing of the customer acceptance form.

Test Plan and Reports

First, create a detailed document that outlines all the unit- and system-level tests required to ensure the MFT system is production-ready. The test plan MUST define the acceptable pass rate to be able to move forward.

In addition to the system- and unit-level tests, your test plan should cover the following scenarios:

� Integrations — What triggers a file transfer? When does a file transfer trigger other systems? These integrations might be through APIs, messages, folder monitoring or schedules.

� Customer/User acceptance — Where does the MFT functionality address the needs of the end users and business stakeholders? This can involve human-to-system and ad-hoc file transfers, as well as system-to system-transfers that impact the business owners.

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� Alerts — Are alerts and notifications being generated and delivered as they should? � Logging — Is the correct logging information being created? � Documentation — Is each file transfer being properly documented? � Flow repository — Is there a unique place to create and share data-flow definition?

Customer Acceptance Form

After the acceptable pass rate has been met for all tests, have stakeholders formally sign the customer acceptance form.

Phase 5 results: At the end of this phase, you will have completed testing with the pass rates required to move into production.

Phase 6 — Roll Out the Solution

This phase brings the MFT solution together with all of the interacting internal and external applications for intense testing. The deliverables in this phase will enable you to identify technical and procedural disconnects and track them to resolution in preparation for production operation of the solution.

Production Prep

Coordinate the rollout date with the operations team, impacted business application owners, the support team and the project team. It’s a good idea to go live during off-hours to minimize the impact on the business.

Training Plan and Materials

Create training materials for the support team and users of the system (if applicable). For the support team, include a troubleshooting checklist and escalation procedures. For users, include hands-on activities in a sandbox environment.

Design Documents

Maintain all design documents with version control. This will be critical for troubleshooting and future enhancements.

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Ongoing Maintenance Documents

These documents should define the necessary regular maintenance, including things like monthly backups, monthly reporting, maintenance windows for upgrades and file system clean-up.

User Training

If applicable, training for end users must be completed prior to going live with the new MFT functionality. Leverage the training plan and sandbox environment you developed earlier.

System Certification and Customer Acceptance

The project team, the operations team and the business application owners must walk through the implementation of the software and the intended use cases to ensure that, based on the design, implementation is correct. This group must sign off on the assumptions, exceptions and deferred functionality before you go live.

Phase 6 results: The rollout phase brings new business processes online and should include a tuning period that gives employees time to understand the capabilities of the MFT solution. You can apply various techniques to bring the system up to full operation while keeping risk to a minimum. For example: – Immediate rollover to new system – Concurrent operation of old and new systems – Alternating transfers between old and new systems The first option often requires scheduled downtime. The second and third options run old and new systems in parallel until there is enough confidence from the business application owners to switch over completely (at which point you would also need to schedule downtime). This phase concludes with the project team taking a “reading” of the key performance indicators to gauge the actual benefits realized by the implementation.

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Phase 7 — Provide Production Support

Production support for the initial projects is essential. During this phase, the project team should work directly with the ongoing support team to perform the following tasks.

On-site Go-live Support

As with any other program or application deployment, the selection of the date and time to switch on the MFT functionality is critical. The project customer, the support team and the business application owners should have been consulted and come to an agreement during production prep in Phase 6. The project team needs to be available on site during the go-live efforts.

Training for the Support Team

Conduct formal training for the support team that covers the implementation details and how to diagnose and address the most common issues. All the information should be delivered in a Production Support Manual that includes ongoing management tasks.

You should also define the escalation process and establish 24-hour support at this time. MFT often impacts business-critical processes, so identifying primary and secondary support contacts is mandatory.

Project Wrap-up and Customer Acceptance

As part of the initial project plan, you should have defined the post go-live timeframe where the project team is on-call to support the implementation. The timeframe should also include a ramp-down schedule for pulling team members off the project. Of course, the duration should be modified based on the number of incidents after the solution goes live.

At the end of the ramp-down, the customer and the support team should conduct a project-close debrief where the stakeholders agree (and sign-off) that the project goals were met. This debrief should also outline areas for improvement and things that were done well and should be adopted as best practices in your Integration Center of Excellence. (See Phase 9).

Phase 7 results: Your new MFT solution is live!

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Phase 8 — Plan for Advanced Functionality

Initial projects typically provide basic MFT functionality, and your organization will be highly satisfied with reliable delivery and appropriate notifications. (Remember, a lack of reliability and visibility was one of the biggest reasons you needed a modern MFT solution in the first place.)

A successful implementation of your MFT strategy will undoubtedly create demand for more advanced functionality to meet new business requirements driven by both internal factors (like a new business strategy) and external factors (like new regulations or standards). Whatever the driver is, it will impact your MFT implementation going forward.

You may be able to address new requirements with your current strategy. However, delivering advanced MFT functionality will require a new level of integration with your current MFT product or, in extreme cases, new software implementations.

Choose Your MFT Products Wisely

The best-case scenario is to choose your initial MFT products wisely, so you can avoid major disruptions or replacing your MFT implementation in the future.

Key Functionality

Be sure the product(s) you select to implement your MFT strategy can deliver the following advanced functionality:

� Governance: Can you centrally define and manage file flows and policies, track all activity and changes, and report on it all?

� Clustering: Can you use clustering and load balancing to ensure scalability, high availability, redundancy and performance?

� On-boarding and self service: Can users, departments and developers request, implement and manage MFT functionality with limited or no help from the MFT team?

� Straight-through transfers: Can the solution deliver data directly to external parties without it ever being at rest?

� Shared service: Can you provide MFT as a service to multiple departments, lines of business and locations?

� ESB integration: Can the solution consume and produce messages that can be consumed by an enterprise service bus? Is your ESB able to drive your file transfers and react to a file transfer? Is your file transfer solution able to provide exact status on data movement and allow your ESB to acknowledge it?

� System analytics: Does the solution provide dashboard functionality to visualize performance? Can you integrate external systems via alerts and notifications?

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� SOA integration: Can you provide MFT functionality as a web service that can be used in a composite service?

� Mobile integration: Can you provide secure MFT functionality to mobile apps on an as-needed basis?

� Cloud integration: Can you easily and securely move data to and from cloud-based deployments?

� Priority and bandwidth management: Can you better address SLAs by managing priority of transfers and how much bandwidth they can consume?

Iterative Phases

Referring back to our original diagram of the incremental phases of implementation, notice the connection from the “Advanced Functionality” phase back to “Business Case” phase.

The reality is that the technology you started this journey with may not be able to address the new needs of the organization. If your original product choice can’t meet evolving MFT requirements, you might be able to simply add a component to the existing solution or you might need to replace the entire solution. In either case, it is important to revisit Phase 1 and justify the new business case. The good news is that the work you’ve already done with the Axway MFT Survival Guide means you know how to evaluate, position, optimize and justify this new approach for the long term.

Phase 8 results: In this phase, you have identified the advanced functionality required to meet new business requirements, and determined whether your existing MFT solution can meet them.

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Phase 9 — Establish an Integration Center of Excellence

The ongoing success of your MFT implementation requires an efficient approach to defining and managing new flows. This is accomplished by establishing best practices and ensuring that they are followed consistently.

Success also demands a regular evaluation of the technology and strategy to make sure it still addresses the needs of the business. In many organizations, this is the job of the Integration Center of Excellence (COE) , which encompasses phases 3 through 8.

In the COE, there should be a primary owner of MFT technology and multiple secondary owners. This will ensure that expertise will be covered if there are changes in organizational structure. The owners of MFT technology should have a deep understanding of the technology itself, when to use it and how it fits into the organization’s integration stack.

The MFT component of a COE is not much different than other integration technologies. Items the COE should own and define include:

Usage Patterns and Reference Implementations — For example:

� User to User

� User to System

� System to System

� Internal to Internal

� Internal to External

� External to Internal

� One to Many

� Many to One

� Ordered

� Time Constrained

� Ad-Hoc

� Scheduled

� Mobile

� Cloud to Ground

� Ground to Cloud

� Big Data Storage

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Governance patterns — For transfers that must meet regulatory, corporate, partner, industry and legal compliance requirements, governance patterns define the list of critical policies (when to use security and at what level) that must be applied and the corresponding alerts and notifications.

Transfer attributes — How and when are specific options used? For example, if post-processing is being used, the COE should define the structure and minimum requirements. The COE should also define when advanced functionality like bandwidth prioritization and file-transfer acceleration should be used.

Continuous technology evaluation — The owners of MFT in the COE should maintain contact with the MFT technology vendor, meeting regularly to understand the direction and roadmap of the solution. Continuous evaluation of the MFT technology will allow the MFT owners to identify new features and functionality that can be leveraged to ensure the implementation will always meet the needs of the business and that your vendor is investing sufficiently in the future of your solution.

Phase 9 results: You now have MFT technology expertise and best practices established in an Integration Center of Excellence that will ensure the ongoing success of your implementation.

Summary

Implementing an MFT solution is, in many ways, no different than any other IT project — it requires careful planning, testing and execution. But don’t underestimate the need for ongoing “care and feeding.” One of the most common mistakes is thinking that MFT is a static technology, a one-time project and that it is not strategic asset.

The growth in bandwidth and ability for any person to generate large data sets requires a change in how you exchange data, and MFT will continue to emerge from the back-office infrastructure as more of a front office solution.

Having a solid MFT strategy will allow your organization to better address file delivery demands while enforcing all the policies you need to maintain compliance and security. Done right, MFT will become a strategic asset that will help your organization deliver on its objectives.

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Axway 5 Suite for MFT Integration, Consolidation and Governance

Axway 5 Suite for MFT can revolutionize the way you manage file transfer with central governance from design to execution and visibility. Axway MFT solutions address all of your potential MFT use cases, so you can:

� Protect the business from data breaches and process disruptions by efficiently managing application-to-application file flows — on premise and in the cloud

� Reduce costs by consolidating customer and partner file flows into a shared service with easy onboarding

� Speed synchronization of file-based data with cloud and big data storage platforms � Provide a secure and governed alternative to consumer-grade, cloud-based file sharing

The Axway 5 Suite components of our MFT solutions are:

Axway Central Governance

Instead of focusing on just the technical aspects of a file transfer or partner connection, Axway Central Governance secures, manages, monitors and measures the end-to-end data flows that drive business interactions. Who are the entities involved? What data is exchanged? How do the processes and connections work?

Your specific business requirements are captured in data-flow definitions stored in a central repository. When a flow is deployed, Central Governance automatically configures the middleware components participating in its execution.

Because it oversees the complete data flow lifecycle, Central Governance provides a unique source of business and IT truth for your entire organization.

Axway SecureTransport

Axway SecureTransport is a multi-protocol MFT gateway for securing, managing, and tracking file flows among people and applications inside your enterprise, and beyond your firewall to your user communities, the cloud and mobile devices. It is designed to handle everything — from high-volume automated file transfers between systems, sites, lines of business and external partners, to user-driven communications and mobile and portal-based file sharing.

An intuitive graphical user interface provides visibility into all file transfer activities, with hierarchical package tracking. And end-to-end monitoring, reporting, alerting and KPI/SLA management ensure you’ll never miss another deadline because of a lost or corrupted file.

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Axway Transfer CFT

Axway Transfer CFT is an enterprise-ready file transfer controller designed for large deployments. You can implement Transfer CFT on a massive scale to provide the same quality of service and a uniform interface to users and applications throughout the enterprise — regardless of the underlying platforms and with minimal impact on your existing applications. Economies of scale reduce the design, deployment and operations costs for the file flows that drive your critical multi-site business processes.

Axway Secure Client

Axway Secure Client enables mass provisioning of a reliable, easy-to-use file transfer client to your enterprise users and business partners. Secure Client works with Axway SecureTransport and can also be used with standard FTPS, HTTPS and SFTP servers to provide advanced file-transfer functionality and security — right off the shelf.

What’s Next?

Now that you’ve made it through the entire MFT Survival Guide series, it’s clear that there is a lot to know and a lot to do. But you don’t have to go it alone. For more than 30 years Axway has been working with all kinds of businesses to design and implement industry-leading MFT solutions.

Are you ready to revolutionize the way you manage file transfer? Let’s talk. Contact us today at www.axway.com/contact-us.

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