eBook

The Essential Guide to Secure and Managed File Transfers on the IBM i

Learn more about how the functionality and affordability of today’s managed file transfer (MFT) solutions bring many benefits to companies of all size including helping businesses save significant staff time, reducing security exposures, meeting SLAs and even creating new competitive advantages.

For many organizations, the IBM i plays a central role in the business-critical applications of an enterprise, often making it a hub for the sending and receiving of electronic ﬁles during the course of doing business. However, transferring ﬁles introduces signiﬁcant risks unless proper security measures are taken. The standard open-source FTP protocol has been around for decades, and many free tools are available for this purpose, but these tools often don’t include any inherent security. When a ﬁle containing sensitive information is transferred with this method, it could easily be intercepted by a hacker and viewed “in the clear.” If your company is required to comply with one or more regulations, such as HIPAA, SOX, PCI DSS, 23 NYCRR 500, GDPR, etc., transferring unsecured ﬁles creates a huge exposure.

Security aside, there is the issue of manageability of ﬁle transfer processes. For companies that send and receive more than a handful of ﬁles, ﬁle transfers can be extremely time-consuming and error-prone without tools that provide automation, application integration, and other critical management functions.

Fortunately, third-party managed ﬁle transfer (MFT) solutions for IBM i are available that provide all necessary security functions in addition to a range of automation, integration, and management features. Consider the following examples of how a full-featured MFT solution can be utilized within an enterprise:

A gaming and hospitality company needs to send ﬁles to their bank each night showing ACH fund transfers. The company’s MFT solution is conﬁgured to automatically detect the ﬁles when these are ready to be sent, transfer the ﬁles to the bank using strong encryption, create an audit record of the transfers, back up the transferred ﬁles to an archive library, and notify relevant staff should any issues arise with any of these processes.
A manufacturing company needs to rapidly process orders from its largest customer. The company’s managed file transfer solution is conﬁgured to automatically and securely connect to the customer’s FTP server and “pull” all available order ﬁles to its IBM i server, after which a program is triggered that starts the process of moving the orders through the company’s order-fulﬁllment applications.

As you can see, an MFT solution can help companies save signiﬁcant staff time, reduce security exposures, meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and even create new competitive advantages.

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