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Posts from ‘Ipswitch’

Sep

Upcoming Webcast: Top Tips for Managing File Transfer & Application Integration

Posted by Deirdre Christensen in Advanced File Services, Customers, FTP, Industry News, Integration, Ipswitch, Ipswitch Products and Services, Managed File Transfer, Management, MFT, Security, Technology and Software, Visibility

Join us on September 29 at 1:00 p.m. ET for our latest webcast, Top Tips for Managing File Transfer & Application Integration.

More and more, organizations are beginning to realize that their old batch-file-and-script methods of file transfer and application integration don’t work. They’re unwieldy, primitive, difficult to manage, and often not 100% reliable – not to mention less scalable than the organization might wish. Don Jones, Principal Technologist at Concentrated Technology, and Andre Bakken, Director of Product Management at Ipswitch, will provide the top tips for managing file transfer and application integration in a more modern way. You’ll learn about the key failings in most organizations’ existing techniques, and look at the core capabilities you should be looking for as you move to improve your organization’s treatment of these critical tasks.

Register Now for the webcast!

What: Webcast – Top Tips for Managing File Transfer & Application Integration

When: September 29 at 1:00 p.m. ET

Who: Don Jones, Principal Technologist at Concentrated Technology and Andre Bakken, Director of Product Management at Ipswitch

Sep

Ipswitch Employees Help Needy Families for 9/11 Day of Service

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Posted by Deirdre Christensen in Best Places to Work, iCare@IPSWITCH, Ipswitch, Philanthropy, Press

It was a beautiful, warm day last Saturday, September 10th when 40 Ipswitch employees headed to the Bank of America Pavilion in Boston’s Seaport District to spend the day with almost 200 area children and families.

As a part of the 9/11 national day of service, we donned our Ipswitch iCare t-shirts to take part in a luncheon and day of fun organized by the Foundation To Be Named Later (FTBNL), a Red Sox affiliate, to support Room To Grow, a charity which helps infants in poverty. Other beneficiaries and invitees to the luncheon included the West End House Boys and Girls Club and Horizons for Homeless Children. Parents raising babies in poverty face many challenges including isolation and lack of resources, say organizers of the event. A special social gathering over lunch can provide meaningful social connections and much-needed respite.

The day began with setting up the arts and crafts tables, decorating the dining tables with fun baseball-inspired centerpieces, and assisting the six Boston-area restaurants who generously catered the event.

When the children and their families arrived, the fun really began! Ipswitchers mingled with the wonderful families, Theo and Paul Epstein (brothers and co-founders of FTBNL), and supporters of the charities. Balloon animals and temporary tattoos were the biggest hits, while the children also enjoyed face painting, coloring, bubbles, and decorating picture frames.

When lunch was served, it became clear that it would be a special treat for volunteers and invitees alike. Six Boston-area restaurants created some seriously delicious gourmet treats, including chicken tacos, macaroni & cheese, mini pastrami sandwiches, and sophisticated “PB&J” sandwiches with fig and blue cheese!

This was truly a special event in which Ipswitch was fortunate to participate. We each enjoyed meeting the inspirational families and children from Room to Grow, Horizons for Homeless Children, and the West End House Boys and Girls Club. A big thank you goes out to the Foundation to Be Named Later for organizing this luncheon!

To see more of the pictures from the event, check out our Facebook Album!

Aug

SaaS Doesn’t Equal IaaS: How Integration and Infrastructure Become Table Stakes

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Posted by fkenney in Cloud Computing, Frank Kenney, IaaS, Ipswitch, Managed File Transfer, MFT, SaaS

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been putting the final touches on our next generation of services that will be delivered via the cloud. As with any product or service release, there comes a fair amount of planning including ensuring that one has the best site into competitors, forecast and of course customers. We’ve worked closely with industry analysts, our end-users and prospects and our own internal resources to best understand how and where we should position our cloud services. In presentation after presentation and in conversation after conversation, we were presented market slides showing the enormous growth and opportunity within the overall software as a service (SaaS) markets. The natural reaction is to get excited about all the money we can make in this space; before we did, I issued a strong warning to our team:

“In very much the same way that software is analogous to infrastructure, software as a service is not analogous to infrastructure as a service. That includes integration as a service. The profile of the consumer of SaaS will more than likely expect that things like integration, interoperability, transformation and governance will be part of the service subscription.”

In a nutshell what I was saying was… do not look at forecasts for SaaS and assume that the opportunities for IaaS follow the same trends. If users create content by using services that are delivered via the cloud, they have a reasonable expectation that this content can be shared with other services delivered via the cloud (not necessarily by the same vendor). For example, creating content via salesforce.com and sharing that content with gooddata.com should be as simple as granting the necessary permissions. After all, my Facebook, Twitter and Google+ information is shared by clicking a few buttons. Make no mistake, integration and interoperability are nontrivial, but part of the expectation of using cloud services is that the consumer is shielded from these complexities. As more and more cloud service platforms and providers build in integration and governance technologies the need for a separate IaaS provider will likely diminish.

Don’t get me wrong, I still believe that there is a place for technologies such as managed file transfer and business-to-business integration and collaboration; I definitely believe that Ipswitch will play a significant role in the evolution of those markets. Expect the role of Ipswitch to be evolve as well; not only will we provide the best mechanisms for moving content of any size but we will also govern (or let you govern) that movement and the entire experience around it. This is the centerpiece of Ipswitch’s Cloud strategy.

Aug

You might say that the entire point of a Managed File Transfer (MFT) system is to do exactly that: provide centralized management and control. For example, let’s say that your company is subject to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Requirement 4 of PCI DSS is to “encrypt transmission of cardholder data and sensitive information across public networks,” such as the Internet. Let’s also say that you frequently need to transmit cardholder data to partner companies, such as vendors who will be fulfilling requests.

One option is to simply allow someone within your company to email that information, or to have an automated process do so. You’ll need to ensure that everyone remembers to encrypt those emails — you did remember to get digital certificates for everyone, correct? — every single time. If someone forgets, you’ve created the potential for a data breach, and it’s not going to look very good for your company on the evening news.

Another option is to automate the file transfer using an MFT solution. That solution can be centrally configured to always apply PGP‐based encryption to the file, to always require an FTP‐over‐SSL connection with the vendors’ FTP servers, and to always require 256‐bit AES encryption. You don’t have to remember those details beyond the initial configuration — it’s
centrally configured. Even if your users need to manually transfer something ad‐hoc — perhaps an additional emergency order during the Christmas rush — your MFT solution will “know the rules” and act accordingly. Your users’ lives become easier, your data stays protected, and everyone sleeps more soundly at night. This central control is often referred to as policy-based configuration because it’s typically configured in one spot and enforced — not just applied — to your entire MFT infrastructure, regardless of how many physical servers and clients you are running.
What’s the difference between enforced and applied? Making a configuration change is applying it. That doesn’t, of course, stop someone else from coming along behind you and applying a new configuration. The idea with policies is that they’re configured sort of on their own, and that they’re protected by a unique set of permissions that govern who can modify them—they’re not just wide‐open to the day‐to‐day administrators who maintain your servers. In many cases, a review/approve workflow may have to be followed to make a change to a policy. Once set, the policies are continually applied to manageable elements such as MFT client software and MFT servers. A server administrator can’t just re-configure a server, because the policy prevents it. The MFT solution ensures that your entire MFT infrastructure stays properly configured all the time.

- From The Tips and Tricks Guide to Managed File Transfer by Don Jones

To read more, check out the full eBook or stay tuned for more file transfer tips and tricks!

Aug

Possibly not. The Internet’s venerable File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is usually supported by Managed File Transfer (MFT) systems, which can typically use FTP as one of the ways in which data is physically moved from place to place. However, MFT essentially wraps a significant management and automation layer around FTP. Consider some of the things an MFT solution might provide above and beyond FTP itself—even if FTP was, in fact, being used for the actual transfer of data:

Most MFT solutions will offer a secure, encrypted variant of FTP as well as numerous other more‐secure file transfer options. Remember that FTP by itself doesn’t offer any form of transport level encryption (although you could obviously encrypt the file data itself before sending, and decrypt it upon receipt; doing so involves logistical complications like sharing passwords or certificates).
MFT solutions often provide guaranteed delivery, meaning they use file transfer protocols that give the sender a confirmation that the file was, in fact, correctly received by the recipient. This can be important in a number of business situations.
MFT solutions can provide automation for transfers, automatically transferring files that are placed into a given folder, transferring files at a certain time of day, and so forth.
MFT servers can also provide set‐up and clean‐up automation. For example, successfully‐transferred files might be securely wiped from the MFT server’s storage to help prevent unauthorized disclosure or additional transfers.
MFT servers may provide application programming interfaces (APIs) that make file transfer easier to integrate into your internal line‐of‐business applications.
MFT solutions commonly provide detailed audit logs of transfer activity, which can be useful for troubleshooting, security, compliance, and many other business purposes.
Enterprise‐class MFT solutions may provide options for automated failover and high availability, helping to ensure that your critical file transfers take place even in the event of certain kinds of software or hardware failures.

In short, FTP isn’t a bad file transfer protocol—although it doesn’t offer encryption. MFT isn’t a file transfer protocol at all; it’s a set of management services that wrap around file transfer protocols—like FTP, although that’s not the only choice—to provide better security, manageability, accountability, and automation.

In today’s business, FTP is rarely “enough.” Aside from its general lack of security—which can be partially addressed by using protocols such as SFTP or FTPS instead—FTP simply lacks manageability, integration, and accountability. Many businesses feel that they simply need to “get a file from one place to another,” but in reality they also need to:

Make sure the file isn’t disclosed to anyone else
Ensure, in a provable way, that the file got to its destination
Get the file from, or deliver a file to, other business systems (integration)

In some cases, the business might even need to translate or transform a file before sending it or after receiving it. For example, a file received in XML format may need to be translated to several CSV files before being fed to other business systems or databases—and an MFT solution can provide the functionality needed to make that happen.

Many organizations tend to look at MFT first for its security capabilities, which often revolve around a few basic themes:

Protecting data in‐transit (encryption)
Ensuring that only authorized individuals can access the MFT system (authorization and authentication)
Tracking transfer activity (auditing)
Reducing the spread of data (securely wiping temporary files after transfers are complete, and controlling the number of times a file can be transferred)

These are all things that a simple FTP server can’t provide. Having satisfied their security requirements, organizations then begin to take advantage of the manageability capabilities of MFT systems, including centralized control, tracking, automation, and so forth—again, features that an FTP server alone simply can’t give you.