WHITEPAPERGUIDETECHNOLOGY

Modern MFT
How to Simplify Integration & Reduce Risk with
Secure Managed File Transfer

Introduction
Managed file transfer (MFT) is the secure, centralized transfer of data or files between
computers over a secure network connection. While it may sound mundane, thistechnology is playing an increasingly critical role in corporate IT strategy — in stark
contrast to the scattered approach of long-marginalized legacy file transfer.
Comprised of scattershot processes and ad hoc solutions, such as FTP, HTTP, andothers, legacy file transfer has been the domain of individuals and enterprisedepartments solving one-off problems with siloed solutions.
But today’s enterprises operate with more applications and systems than ever before
and must manage interwoven processes spanning many teams and departments.
Creating a seamless customer experience powered by smooth operations means
unifying these disparate systems with a smarter approach to file transfer, a unified
managed file transfer approach.
In this guide, we cover how MFT must adapt to the new digital landscape and how you canleverage MFT to improve operational efficiency, speed time to delivery, and win happy
customers amid rising expectations — all while managing compliance & governance.

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Part I: What’s Wrong with Good, Old
Fashioned File Transfer?
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, as the old adage goes. So, if enterprise departments andindividual teams have subsisted for years with their one-off file transfer solutions, whyshould you spend precious time and IT resources on managed file transfer?
The reality? for many companies, Frankensteined file transfer processes waste IT
resources’ time on maintenance, burn holes through budgets and are hopelessly illequipped to deal with the enterprise data sources, applications, and systems in the modern
enterprise ecosystem.
For thousands of organizations, there’s a familiar sequence of events at play.

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1. Teams Create Duplicate Band-Aids
Without an intentionally planned managed file transfer solution, teams begin to adopt
one-off band-aids. Many either purchase numerous vendor solutions, duplicating costs
unnecessarily, or, worse, develop their own duplicate in-house solutions, pulling IT anddevelopment resources away from other projects that can deliver more businessvalue.

2. Fragmentation Leads to Complexity &Maintenance Headaches
The file transfer duplicates create complexity and tangled processes for all involved. IT
teams are tasked with connecting the disparate processes developed by different
teams and departments, resulting in increased maintenance and a higher total cost ofownership (TCO).

3. Broken Processes Reduce Agility & Slow the Pace ofBusiness
When processes are all over the place, building a critical new data flow between teams
becomes a long, involved project because broken processes cause a host of problems:••••

Configuration becomes difficult and error-prone
Flows in production don’t match the blueprints
Ever-growing data volumes tax resources
Thousands of security certificates need to be managed

MFT infrastructure, or the lack thereof, impacts business in a real way. As data flows,
including file transfers, are stuck, teams lose the agility they need for modern digitalbusiness and projects fall behind.

4. Limited Visibility = Limited Improvement
Scattered solutions and processes beget scattered reporting. As systems growincreasingly complex to deal with new data flows, IT teams and enterprisedepartments alike struggle to set up and use indicators for incident, problem, andchange management. The lack of visibility clouds the picture of what contributes tocosts, delays, and quality issues, throwing wrenches into continuous improvement
initiatives.

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Part II: The Vision for Modern MFT
If legacy, one-off file transfer isn’t the path forward, what replaces it?
For today’s IT squads serving enterprise departments, the modern vision is a centralized
managed file transfer model that satisfies core requirements, supports IT-driven digitaltransformation and enables business users without flooding IT resources.
When done right and to its full potential MFT looks a bit like this:IT Benefits

Business Benefits

MFT Processes and Solutions
are Consolidated

Technology and Processes Alignwith Business Strategy

Disjointed file and data transfer services
are consolidated into a single solution orsuite of complementary MFT solutions,
reducing duplicate band-aids and custom
development time.

MFT architecture and processes align withorganizational data flow requirements,
supporting the synchronization of criticalbusiness processes across teams,
departments, and the organization.

MFT Access and Processes
are Standardized

For Business Users, Critical Data and Files
are Just There, Where They Need to Be

With solutions and processes managed
centrally, processes can largely be
standardized across the organization,
reducing complexity, maintenance, errors,
security risks, and IT requests.

Intuitive tools and defined processes
provide the data and files business users
need in the tools and interfaces they alreadyknow. MFT serves as a black box, and they
don’t have to mess with file transfers.

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IT Benefits

Business Benefits

Regulatory Compliance and Security
are Ensured

Workflows Can Be Developed at the
Pace of Business

MFT processes adhere to secure filetransfer standards and data governanceregulations, while reducing “shadow IT”
and rogue file transfers to better enforce
security, compliance and data governancepolicies.

Through workflows built on vetted,
nimble MFT solutions, IT teams caneliminate manual integration work andenable departments and teams to meettheir critical business timelines andobjectives.

CostCost-Efficient Modernization Supports IT
Infrastructure Automation

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
is Optimized

MFT supports strategic transformations
like infrastructure as code, containerbased delivery, configuration
management, and audits. IT automatesprocesses with MFT, speeding service
delivery, while reducing time-spend,complexity and bugs from upgrades.

Standardized processes and solutions,cut workflow and file transfer costs
across the board. Savings come fromreduced maintenance, fewer errors,
elimination of duplicate solutions, andtime diverted from developing custom,
in-house solutions.

MFT Supports Data Consolidation,
Management, & OnOn-Demand Use
The MFT solution connects with APIs tomove files and documents into an
enterprise data warehouse or data lake,feeding it with events and metadata forease of searching and enabling live data
consumption on-demand from businessapplications, systems, and users.

Organizational Leaders Gain
EndEnd-toto-End Visibility
Key personnel know the status of files,
apps, SLAs, and human actions intransfers. There’s reporting on timesensitive security certificate expirations,keys, logins, and flow validity. Real-timeviews show current & forecasted
transfer patters to keep flows on track.

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Part III: Simplifying & Streamlining MFT witha Unified Solution
Transitioning from scattered file transfer to modern MFT delivers extensive benefits, fromcost savings to improved security, better business processes, enhanced visibility, andautomation enablement, among others.
But how do you successfully implement an MFT modernization process to unify your filetransfers with better tools and systems?
While the process will vary from organization to organization, there’s a tried and true
process many organizations have broadly followed.

Understand Existing Processes
To improve your processes, you’ll need to understand the systems already in place. Here’s
what you’ll need to know:• Which solutions are currently in use• The personnel and processes affected by ad hoc solutions• The hidden and total ownership costs associated with them
• Process bottlenecks and time-waste caused by scattered solutions• And the biggest security and compliance risks associated with them
You can leverage this information to make a strong business case for MFT, comprised of
key components:
1. Outline financial, organizational and customer service benefits you can gain byenabling a self-service MFT model through best practices.
2. Align file transfer activities around common business goals — such as those
discussed in part two of this white paper.
3. Prioritize processes where you can use a unified MFT solution to save yourcompany the most time and money while eliminating the worst risks.

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Establish and Enforce Patterns — Standardization
Once you’ve taken an assessment of the problems caused by a scattered approachthroughout your organization, you can begin to streamline and centralize processes.
Ultimately, you’ll select a unified MFT solution that will allow you to align MFT to yourbusiness goals.
Your streamlined MFT process will need to integrate MFT processes into your existing IT
infrastructure and handle such business initiatives as file delivery to apps, ERP, CRM, andother solutions, data consolidation and backup in data stores, EDI partner exchanges, data
flow provisioning, and channel lifecycles.
With a solution in place, you’ll need to establish and enforce standard file transfer
behaviors that accommodate industry regulations and anticipate potential digital MFT
solution failure. You’ll need to empower business users to benefit from your MFT solution
while balancing security and compliance. The reality is you’ll need the right, unified MFTsolution to make this possible.

Key Requirements of Modern, Unified MFT Solutions
Broad Protocols Coverage
Any quality MFT solution must provide coverage for all the major file transfer protocols,such as AS2, AS4, FTP, SFTP, OFTP2, and others. In the case of AS2, solutions must be
Drummond-Certified and ease the support of new security standards and regulations.

Data Connectivity for Backend Integration
For MFT to break down silos and facilitate the connected enterprise, your unified MFTsolution must act as a ubiquitous bridge. It must easily interface with your coreapplications, systems, IT components, communications channels for notifications, anddata storage services — e.g. data warehouses and lakes. This connectivity should bedelivered intuitively, through data connectors that allow you to directly integrate MFT withyour IT infrastructure.

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Modern, API-Driven Architecture: Support Automation
You can’t modernize file transfer without a modern MFT solution. One of the biggest
elements of modern MFT is an API-driven architecture that supports microservices.
Tools with a REST-based management API can expose MFT features through a modern
web API interface like REST, JSON, or OData, so you can onboard new connections
programmatically, create complex scripted management workflows, or take advantage ofindividual MFT capacities from other applications.
This enables users to easily, create custom APIs (or microservices) to provide entry points
that trigger integration workflows, access data, and publish data — without writing custom
code. Workflows can auto-update data, send notifications, generate reports, and more.
Creating workflows triggered by microservices enables you to build an infrastructure that’seasy to develop, test, and maintain. Such an infrastructure helps you scale and reducescomplexity. Tool with API management capabilities also allow organizations to build APIs
that provide secure, real-time access to siloed data stored in a custom database, legacy
applications, or even program files, such as Excel.
The solution should help you:
• Act efficiently on triggered events wherever they occur (A2A & B2B)
• Define and schedule workflows• Create multi-step automations• Tie into pre and post-transfer events
You can use API access to create custom events that kick off pre or post-processing
events, triggers or other integrations. For example, your developers can create a postprocessing event that routes a file to multiple destinations or resubmits a message after
50 minutes if it initially fails to transmit. Modern MFT solutions must support this type of
automation to help IT teams break down organizational silos and facilitate businessprocess automation (BPO).

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Enterprise-Grade Security
MFT solutions provide the vital security features to reduce your risk so you can ensurecompliance with data regulations, like HIPAA. These include:• Client/Server Authentication:
Authentication This provides granular control over user directorypermissions and authenticate users• Certificate Management:
Management You’ll want the ability to manage Open PGP keys, SSH
keys, and other certificates.
• Encryption:
Encryption MFT must secure data at rest or in motion with the latest algorithms,
such as Open PGP or AES — Windows encryption can be used to encrypt
passwords & data.
• Secure Access:Access TLS should secure access to the MFT solution, and API accessshould also be secured through user-generated authtokens.
• Backup:
Backup MFT must also support backup and editing for configuration files.

Scalable and Flexible
As your organization grows, or you incorporate more and more of your file transfer needs
into standardized MFT processes, it’s crucial that any unified MFT solution scale with you.
Some key elements include: load balanced and high availability setups, compatibility withany system disk and server you select, and deployment flexibly across different
environments, such as on-premise on Windows machines and Apple, Linux, or Unix
systems, as well as in the cloud and in hybrid cloud environments. Certain organizations
may also prefer to run MFT through existing IT infrastructures, such as right in Amazon
Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and in containers running on platforms like Docker.

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Easy to Use
As you well know, one of the most important keys to ensuring a solution is actuallyadopted is its ease of use. Select an MFT platform that provides low-code and no-code
access via a visual interface, such as a drag-and-drop workflow builder.
Ideally, the solution will provide easy-to-use templates or pre-packaged integrations to thebackend systems you use, to accelerate deployments and minimize maintenance costs.

Governance, Logging, and Auditing
Audit trails and logs are necessary to ensure regulatory compliance and SLAs, reduce risk
and simplify troubleshooting. Select a unified MFT solution that provides real-time,
actionable insights on data transmission usage and trends. To deliver these benefits, yoursolution must be able to:• Track a message’s location when errors arise• Actively monitor for files received & ones to send
• Provide audit trails for all interactions• Deliver non-repudiation with MDNs available for every transaction• Support advanced search for configuration and troubleshooting
You will also find it helpful if your tool provides direct data connectivity to reporting
platforms and easy backup & editing for configuration files.

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Conclusion
Scattered, ad hoc file transfer is highly inefficient and often causes unnecessary risks tosecurity and compliance. At the same time, it leads to duplication of solutions, highmaintenance costs, and wasted time.
With a unified approach to MFT, you can modernize file transfer throughout yourorganization and reduce risks, while saving your organization time, money, and headaches.
To reap the benefits of MFT, you’ll need to set a vision for a unified infrastructure. Next,
identify and uncover broken, inefficient processes. Then, consolidate them with a unified
MFT solution that allows you to simplify, streamline, and standardize them.
With unified MFT, you’ll establish smarter processes to enable efficient, secure dataexchanges and provide enhanced reporting, visibility, and continuous improvement.

About ArcESB
ArcESB is a modern MFT platform that checks all the boxes that legacy and scattered MFTsolutions never will. It’s Drummond-Certified, secure, cost-efficient and built on a modern,
API-driven architecture that unlocks the true value potential of secure managed filetransfer.
Visit www.arcesb.com/mft/ to learn more about ArcESB for MFT

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