Top 3 MFT Best Practices Shared by Users

Albert Einstein once said “Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”

At Globalscape, we always strive to understand our current users better and keep our pulse on tech trends as well as changes in specific industries. As such, we hosted two user group meetings in November where we were able to dive deeper into how Globalscape’s technology is really used every day, where users face challenges and what future features should be considered for coming iterations of the platform.

Based on what we heard in these discussions, we felt there were some commonalities to the areas that customers are focused on most, knowledge that other customers could relate to or learn from – and use cases where our technology can help. We also learned that for many of our users, some of the best ways to learn about tackling a problem was by hearing from their peers.

Based on these two days of conversations, we’ve pulled together some of the most important issues and best practices as shared by Globalscape users:

1. Transparency

Organizational data is a critical concern for users. How it moves through or into and out of the network is still a high priority for the small sampling of customers that were in attendance. Many customers still have such firm service-level agreements in place with their network of vendors or partners that even a five-minute delay might create some serious ramifications, making transparency around data movement more important than ever.

Globalscape Enhanced File Transfer (EFT) provides administrators with a better view into where company data is being sent, received, accessed and stored. That handle on an organization’s data gives IT the tools they need to better control and manage sensitive information, which can be the lifeblood of a business.

Tip: Views into the performance of individual or group transfers is incredibly important, but often the information is also shared with internal stakeholders or used to assess related activities like best times to send data or start maintenance work. 

2. Automation

Being able to automate regular tasks associated with data flows and procedures saves time and reduces the potential for errors. This was an important area for our user group participants. Additionally, participants said that automation was critical in looking for areas in which they could increase efficiency.

Event Rules or the Automated Workflow Engine (AWE) play a significant role in assisting users with their automation needs. Both Event Rules and AWE offer a robust set of automation capabilities to define user controls or access, schedule transfers, and react to information received/sent, among a number of other items. Less risk and more time are critical for any IT department, not just Globalscape customers. 

Tip: Per our user group discussions, a few automation best practices shared includes how automation features could be used as a task builder and that often, the tools allow you to go beyond the code, create subtasks within a workflow as well as control a number of a variables.   

3. Disaster Recovery

With the recent Internet outages caused by the cyberattacks on Dyn, or the recurring stories of critical systems going down due to network updates, as was the case with United Airlines, having tools to assist, minimize, or prevent disasters from occurring is vital. Features like High Availability are essential for organizations looking to get a handle on their data before or during a crisis.

The High Availability module offers users a chance to set up their network in an active-active cluster, which better manages network traffic spikes or outages as they occur. Reducing the potential of downtime could save organizations money in the short- and long-term, which makes offering these features an essential part of any network ecosystem. 

Tip: Users shared that when it comes to HA functionality, the feature set not only helped with disaster recovery efforts but ultimately came in handy for network changes or upgrades, as you can direct traffic to the backup cluster during maintenance periods.

Overall, the insights shared by our user group participants—on transparency, automation and disaster recovery—are important for Globalscape. The features or modules we’ve been developing in these key areas are vital for our customers, and demonstrate that it’s more important than ever to protect sensitive data. These user areas of focus also allow us to not only to continue improving on our platforms, but also to better understand our customers’ worlds as they interact with the daily IT environments.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Enhanced File Transfer can help provide transparency, establish automated workflows and add resources to a disaster recovery plan, contact a Globalscape representative today.

Photo Credit: Danny Maher, HANDD