How Workflow Automation Eases File Transfer Growing Pains

Your IT team strives to deliver non-stop, high-performance services in support of your organization. It can be surprising how big of a role file transfer services can play in that effort.

In the digital era, businesses transfer vast amounts of data every day—and huge sums of money are spent to ensure that there’s enough bandwidth and support to get that data where it needs to go. One could even argue that data has become the lifeblood of the modern economy. And yet, too many IT teams supporting the transfer of this data spend tons of valuable time and resources setting up and maintaining manual file transfer scripting and management efforts. With a proper workflow automation tool, you can consolidate disparate file transfer processes, migrate to a centralized system, and achieve improved reliability and security, while reducing IT workloads and costs.

That's the topic of my most recent whitepaper, Five Key Opportunities of MFT Workflow Automation, in which I examine how workflow automation can address the myriad of file transfer challenges facing IT teams like yours.

FTP and Scripting Aren’t Always Enough, But Automation Eases Growing Pains

Historically, many IT organizations have taken a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach to file transfer processes. These likely started with manual processes, which then evolved to legacy FTP operations and scripts that were built to provide some level of automation for often repeated transfers. These cobbled-together solutions can work well for a time, and for some small companies, they may be all you need. However, as file transfers become core business processes with the concurrent need to protect data in transit, these DIY approaches often prove problematic at best, and critically flawed, or even dangerous at worst.

Typical issues include a lack of visibility and control, weak enforcement of data security and compliance, lost productivity due to insufficient resources and inefficient workflows, and complicated integrations. So naturally, as the number of files transferred increases, and the cost of file transfers increases, many organizations look for a better way to transfer files. If you’re wondering if these issues are affecting your organization, ask yourself the following questions:

• Do you have difficulty determining when a file was transferred, where it went, and if it even got there? Do you sometimes have to spend hours searching for lost file transfers?
• Is the scheduling of file transfer jobs a monumental challenge when routine obstacles arise (for example, manually rescheduling every job when a password changes)?
• Is the scripting process for file transfer job creation and execution time consuming and error prone?
• Are your scripts unable to provide the activity logs required in an audit?
• Given these everyday challenges, do you feel you’re already playing “catch up” when it comes to implementing the measures that may be required by applicable data protection laws?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’d likely benefit from automating your file transfer workflows with an automation solution. Automating file transfer operations offers IT teams the opportunity to lower costs, improve productivity, improve security, minimize the risk of human error and increase visibility.

To learn more about how workflow automation can help ease file transfer growing pains for your organization, check out our free whitepaper, 5 Key Opportunities of MFT Workflow Automation.