Kyle Parris
Director of Product Management
nuBridges
The answers to this question can be as varied as the global enterprises that are investing in managed file transfer (MFT) solutions. But what we’ve found over the last six months in researching the market and speaking with dozens of global enterprises that are planning to replace a jumble of file transfer solutions with MFT, is that the answers can be grouped into three broad categories:
√ “We’ve outgrown our current solution(s).” In asking for specific examples, we found a number of trends:
- We are starting to move too many files, or files are becoming too large to transfer quickly, reliably and securely
- As our business expands, we need to collaborate with more business partners; each requesting a different protocol, or encryption method
- Our current solution doesn’t track or monitor file movements, so it doesn’t help at audit time
- We need scheduled, event-triggered and ad hoc file transfer capabilities that our point solution just doesn’t offer
- We have multiple platforms, but our current solution only supports <enter your favorite platform here>
- We need to integrate ERP applications into our file transfer solution, but our current solution doesn’t handle this
√ “The costs of managing and supporting multiple file transfer applications are staggering.” Common themes were that enterprises are incurring major costs due to:
- Keeping the administrative and support teams trained on multiple solutions
- Lack of economies of scale in licensing and maintenance costs
- File transfer workflow inefficiencies resulting in wasted time, expense and errors associated with manual file transfers
√ “The risks associated with lack of control over file transfers keeps me up at night.” What we learned is that enterprises are equally concerned about data breaches, non-compliance with applicable regulations and laws and loss of critical business documents.
All three seem to be top of mind with the folks we’ve been talking with recently.
How about you? Are you considering a move to the new generation in managed file transfer? If so, please let our readers know what’s driving your decision making.
Until next week,
Kyle