How to Declutter Your Workflow by Streamlining Processes and Reducing File Transfer Hassles

Efficient file transfer to internal and external stakeholders is crucial, yet many organizations struggle with the process. This article explores key factors in file data movement and best practices for successful business outcomes.

Files continue to be critical to business processes throughout the world. While there’s been a lot of movement to web services and other non-file EDI methods, it’s not as prevalent as you might think. Files are still critical and moving file data to internal and external stakeholders is essential. There are lots of ways to do it—and lots of ways to get it wrong. In this post, we explore different factors and how to go about achieving the business results you need.

The Problems with Manual File Transfer Methods

One way or another, we’ve come to learn that manual methods like using FTP clients or email attachments or even purpose-built scripts can bring their own problems. Ad hoc methods and emails aren’t trackable and they’re prone to error in scripts. To start, these manual methods drain personnel resources. They require programmers with a specific skillset, and they tend to get messy fast and require a lot of work when modifications need to be made.

In the past decade, we’ve had new services emerge in the market, yet they don’t usually provide a lot in the way of automation, controls or tracking. Even big cloud provider offerings require you to integrate a lot of their pieces, which leads to complex integration challenges.

This is the turning point for many. You may have been put in a problematic situation because of the myriad of proposed solutions. Yet, you are still struggling because none of the solutions fit the bill. In fact, many of these methods are risky and could probably get you into a lot of trouble if the outcome goes sideways.

The Solution: Managed File Transfer (MFT)

This is where managed file transfer (MFT) comes in with its unique ability to solve many of these problems. Let’s dive into what makes MFT stand out and which features make for an effective MFT solution.

First, the driving goal for most people, at least the most visible, is the ability to perform reasonably complex workflows without scripting. Otherwise, we’re back to needing programmers. And it’s usually a little more than saying, “Hey, let’s just move this group of files from server A to server B.”

Or other times, it sounds like this:

• We need to move to multiple endpoints at the same time.
• The files need to be renamed or deleted in a programmatic way.
• The files need to be manipulated in a certain way, such as by encrypting or decrypting.
• We need to do some basic if-then logic, such as if a file is a certain size, zip it up.

The key here is to strike a balance. If it’s too complicated, you might need some programmer-type skills. If it’s too simple, then it’s probably not going to be able to handle all your use cases. Another fundamental need of an MFT system is the ability to deal with various endpoints or hosts or an understanding of where the files come from and where they’re going.

Let’s talk about these scenarios at a very high level, then get more detailed. At the highest level, we’re talking about communicating with mainframes, ERP systems, banking systems or healthcare for medical records or insurance benefits. Or we might be dealing with different industries and a thousand different formats that these industries have with their own peculiarities and workflows. There are more file transfer use cases than you could imagine.

If we take it down one level to a more technical view of how these data exchanges move across the wire, there are varying levels of protocols depending on the type of transfer and system requirements. At the lowest level, most people have heard of FTP or SFTP. And, of course, any trusted MFT package can support FTP and SFTP, yet MFT brings additional multi-layer interaction for added security and reliability.

Managing and Monitoring File Transfers

Another major need is to be able to manage, schedule, run and monitor these data transfer workflows. It’s not enough to run them once. Most organizations need to do this on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis, so you need reliable scheduling. Those who depend on scripts used to rely on things like the Windows Scheduler or cron jobs in Linux or even enterprise schedules.

We find that most organizations are much better served by keeping the scheduler right here in MFT. Closely related to this is the ability to monitor how these transfers are going and answer these questions:

• Are you having failures?
• Which jobs are failing?
• Why are they failing?

Even if you keep your systems clean, you will find that you will have what is called “normal failure.” Something, somewhere, has gone wrong, which tends to happen in an IT environment. Yet, if you are properly monitoring for this and have the right alerts set up, perhaps even configure your MFT to retry select file movement tasks, you can minimize the impact of normal failures.

Now, closely related to this management and monitoring is the ability to report, log and audit. It’s not enough to be alerted in real time that a job is failing; you need to track this over the longer term. For that, you need to be able to get basic reports out of the system as well as more detailed logs when necessary to diagnose any environmental issues you might have. Today, more and more industries are subject to audits of various kinds—sometimes internal, sometimes external—ranging from a governmental organization to a publicly traded company.

Overall, it’s likely you must provide some auditing information about your file transfers, either to prove that certain files are moving correctly for certain business processes or to show who has access to the system and what kind of changes have been made to the file or folder.

How will you handle all these tasks without causing disruptions or more work for you and your team?

How MOVEit Automation Software Can Help

Going back to managed file transfer, a key component within a product solution is automation. Let’s use Progress MOVEit Automation software as our tool of choice for automating file transfers and scheduling projects.

With MOVEit Automation software, any authorized user may easily automate multi-step, logic-based workflows and implement business process rules without programming skills. MOVEit Automation software automatically “pulls, processes and pushes” files to multiple platforms over a wide range of network architectures. Most automation projects can be implemented in hours—not weeks—and without costly professional services or scripts. MOVEit Automation software comes with pre-built tasks and can be extended with custom scripting or existing scripts. A web interface enables management and modifications from any browser.

To assist with monitoring, you can utilize MOVEit Automation software to set up alerts and notifications, including when a critical workflow is completed or a problem with the file transfer occurs. Plus, your obligatory reporting becomes simplified because even if you have hundreds of automations running, you have detailed activity reports and audit logs available when you need them.

Take the Next Step

Now that you know more about how to overcome file transfer hassles, are you ready to simplify your specific workflows? You can get started by requesting a 15-minute demo of MOVEit Automation software. You can also request a trial or check out an on-demand webinar that dives deeper into this topic.

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