Posts from ‘Ipswitch Products and Services’
Is your IT architecture patched by homegrown scripts and antiquated FTP batch jobs Did you know that homegrown solutions cost 10x more than you think they do?
Watch our recently recorded webcast to learn more about the inefficiencies, risks and limitations your current homegrown file transfer environment may be experiencing. Ipswitch’s Andre Bakken and Roger Gassman explain how deploying a managed file transfer (MFT) solution will increase your business velocity, resulting in improved efficiency, less risk and a lower total cost of ownership.
In this webcast, Andre and Roger specifically discuss:
• Why scripts and disparate homegrown solutions become an impossible task
• Why aging workforce introduces instability and uncertainty to homegrown solutions
• What you can do to mitigate security and compliance concerns
• What the risks are of letting your employees find their own ways to share files
• How MFT solutions easily integrate with other applications in your environment
If your custom built solutions are limited and outdated, or if you rely on them to protect and secure confidential data and business processes, then please do take 40 minutes to watch.
Take a quick read of Google’s Terms of Service or Amazon EC2’s SLA Exclusions and you’ll see examples of how cloud platform vendors limit their governance and control responsibility.
So what happens when you put your business in the cloud and then the cloud goes down? Just ask Foursquare, Hootsuite, Reddit, Quora and others who endured the recent EC2 outage that hobbled their websites, resulting in lost revenue and strained customer support teams.
Chances are some of your critical business processes have already moved to the cloud. But you still need to know the instant one of them fails.
So how should you treat vendor platforms such as Salesforce.com, Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud Files and Microsoft Azure?
As the saying goes, “don’t rely on a fox to guard the chicken coop”. Don’t rely solely on your service providers to alert you of inaccuracies or outages that they themselves have caused…. Service provider dashboards will be of no use when they themselves are responsible for failure. A governed pipe will instantly give you that information.
Our suggestion is to treat cloud platform vendors the same way you would treat any other vendor. Manage all file and data interactions, with visibility, management and enforcement… And carefully craft SLAs that represent end-to-end services and link them to easily trackable key performance indicators. Cloud does not solve all your data issues on its own, but you can and should leverage your Managed File Transfer (MFT) solution to extend and govern the cloud.
WS_FTP Server can now be configured to support automatic, unattended failover, enabling your organization to easily achieve high availability for your file transfer processes. Not only will you increase system uptime, reliability, and performance, but you will now be able to provide uninterrupted access to file transfer users – all critical for helping your company deliver exceptional business performance and meet service level agreements around availability.
Take a quick minute and watch Ipswitch’s Jonathan Lampe share his thoughts on our new failover capability for WS_FTP Server:
Why does your business (or organization) need a consolidated managed file transfer application? When working within an organization and with its partners, organizations find that
- Paper-based processes are inadequate, they are labor-intensive and these paper-based processes slow down the ability to conduct business
- Doing away with shipping physical media lowers their risk of losing sensitive data to theft and accidental loss
- Streamlining operations so that there are fewer systems to manage and leverage the lower costs of doing business on the internet, the intranet and in the cloud
From outside an organization, regulatory mandates from agencies and governments are increasing (like PCI, HIPPA and GLBA). Moreover, markets and business are moving faster. Companies that can process transactions quickly (e.g., less than a second) can compete on speed and effeciency.
One MFT Application can replace the disparate file transfer tools and the rogue FTP servers scattered throughout your organization.
As a result, many businesses find they need one file transfer solution that addresses the needs of the entire organization. These businesses need one application and not numerous point applications and tools from several vendors scattered throughout the organization surreptitiously poking holes in their firewalls. They need a one-stop shop for their end users (a single, easy to learn and easy to use UI), their applications (a straightforward API) and their administrators and managers (an application that helps to increase revenue, lower their TCO and maintain their high security standards).
Remember, Managed File Transfer (MFT) is software application (or an appliance) that provides organizations of any size with a holistic solution for all their file transfer needs. Unlike point solutions for file transfer, rogue FTP servers or physical media, a consolidated MFT application means that your organization has one product and one vendor to meet all your file transfer needs. A consolidated MFT application translates into increasing the accessibility and the trackability of your customer, partner and employee information (only for authorized users and uses). At the same time, it increases security, reduces the risk of exposing critical data and lowers your total cost of ownership.
In addition, a consolidated MFT application means increased revenue because your sales electronically instead of by paper, fax or telephone. Remember, a consolidated MFT application helps to integrate your applications (and your partner applications) by making it easy to exchange data programmatically.
In short, a consolidated application increases your visibility to all file transfers within your organization, it increases the speed at which you can do business (thereby increasing the revenues) by seamlessly integrating the data from all your applications and it reduces your total cost of ownership for all file transfer (data movement) applications within your organization by providing a one-stop shop for the application (from one vendor), for its web services APIs and for your teams to work with.
