As more and more organizations are falling under compliance regulations, IT managers are being tasked with finding a secure Managed File Transfer solution to secure and automate data in motion with their trading partners, customers, employees and internal systems.  There are a few out there, but how do you decide which is the best for your organization?  I recently sat down with Patrick Townsend, Founder & CEO to learn more about the core components of a Managed File Transfer solution.  Here is what he has to say:

First, you must have security built-in with your solution. Our Alliance FTP Manager uses a number of secure encrypted mechanisms for transferring files. We use SSL FTP, Secure Shell sFTP, PGP encryption and decryption. That security component is absolutely crucial to the product. I’m really happy with our security, and we have a great partnership with Symantec around their PGP product. Our enterprise customers really expect the highest level of solution when it comes to encryption. We have partnered with Symantec on the PGP product and it carries the proper certification and the depth of support that customers want.

Automation is another core component. If you are dealing with a lot of files, you need to have automation to be efficient. You don’t want to have to do a lot of manual intervention. There should also be a centralized management environment so that configurations can be set up and managed from a central location.

Additionally, notification is another core component. For example you may have files that you’re sending to a customer or your bank. You may only do that transfer once a month, but wouldn’t it be nice if after you transferred the file you sent the customer an email telling them your file is transferred and is ready for processing. With Alliance FTP Manager, we can notify your customer or an entire email list of recipients when a file transfer is complete. Or if there is a failure in a transfer, maybe a customer turned off their FTP server, we can notify that too.  We can do both success and failure notifications in our Managed File Transfer product.

Finally, to meet compliance regulations, you need to have full audit capabilities. We can create audit trails of all the transfers, which is really important from a compliance point of view.

View a recording of our webinar Secure Managed File Transfers: Meeting Compliance Regulations for more information on meeting data in motion requirements of PCI DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, and other compliance requirements on your IBM i.