Five Indications Your Organisation Could Benefit from an MFT

Data is the lifeblood of a modern business.  Your ability to safely store and move data is fundamental to your daily operations.  Your efficiency in moving and using data determines the overall speed at which your business operates.

So it’s worth taking a few moments to consider how to potentially improve the way your team currently stores, protects and moves your valuable organisational data.

Are they still relying on outdated file transfer protocols like FTP? Are they trusting your data to a hodge-podge of risky ad-hoc cloud dropbox-style services?  Are they relying on years-old hand-coded file transfer scripts? 

There’s a better – safer, more robust, faster, more efficient, fully automated – way: Managed File Transfer (MFT).

Here are five key indicators that your business may be ready to benefit from an MFT solution.

Using Outdated Ways to Send Data?

A surprising number of organisations still rely on outdated protocols and clunky scripts to move precious data around. However, these legacy methods increase the risk of human error, take time away from more critical tasks, and are difficult to maintain.

An MFT is easy to use, easy to audit, requires little maintenance, and removes manual tasks from your stretched IT team’s To Do list.

Increasingly Targeted by Cybercriminals?

Your IT team can tell you how many cybercrime incursions they’re seeing daily.   The number may shock you!

With hackers escalating their efforts to extort your business and customers, it’s more essential than ever to secure your data and maintain a ‘circle of trust’ with your supply chain partners.

An MFT solution, such as GoAnywhere MFT, employs the latest encryption algorithms to reduce the risk of data breaches during transit. Features like Access Controls, and Multi-factor Authentication, safeguard sensitive information from unauthorised access.

New Government Regulations?

In response to the impacts of escalating cybercrime on businesses and citizens, governments are imposing ever greater requirements on businesses to ensure they protect consumers’ personal data.

From health data (hospital records, test results), to banking data (debit and credit card numbers, bank account details), to identity data (home address, government id), businesses that fail to take responsible measures to protect sensitive data face growing sanctions. 

Worse, a breach may not only cost your organisation time and money to remediate, it may also ruin your reputation.

An MFT solution helps ensure your file transfers comply with regulatory requirements. Features such as auditing, reporting, role-based access, secure protocols, centralised security controls, encryption, and key management protect employee and consumer data from security mishaps.

Cloud Dependencies?

Many organisations have moved business processes to the cloud, and regularly exchange files with trading partners there.

But transfers to and from the cloud – especially those over public telecommunications networks – require extra protection.

From streamlining and automating cloud file transfers to platforms like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, to integrating with popular web and cloud services like SharePoint and Google Drive, using an MFT makes working with partners in the cloud smooth, reliable and safe.

Evolving Network Conditions?

Research shows that a single hour of system downtime can easily cost a medium-sized business a six-figure sum. 

As organisations and trading partners become increasingly integrated, it’s critical that file transfers are performed without delay or disruption. Whereas a document containing a batch of important transactions may once have been delivered over several hours, today’s fast pace of business requires it to take mere seconds.

An enterprise-calibre file transfer solution should have a high availability plan in place. The right solution will provide active-passive and active-active (i.e. clustering) methods for organisations who need to keep their processes running no matter the situation at hand.

Clustering provides the best high availability by running multiple servers simultaneously. Therefore, if one goes down, file transfers and workflows will continue to run on other servers so communication with your trading partners won’t be interrupted.

The Leading MFT

If any of these indicators ring true for you, it may be time to consider upgrading to an MFT solution.  The acknowledged leading MFT, GoAnywhere, is an all-in-one solution, automating and encrypting file transfers from a centralised dashboard.

GoAnywhere saves businesses time, money, and reputation.

Local Expert Help

At Generic Systems Australia we have decades of experience installing and customising MFT solutions to suit the needs of Australian and New Zealand businesses. 

If you’d like to explore how MFT can boost your organisation’s security and efficiency, please feel welcome to get in touch.  I’m always ready to have a broad-ranging, no-obligation discussion.

If you’d like, I can even organise a quick proof-of-concept to demonstrate how MFT can be easily tailored to your organisation’s specific needs.

At Generic Systems Australia, we’re your local experts in Managed File Transfer.