Today I had a conversation with a good colleague (Bill Ho from Biscom) and we got into the idea of governance as it relates to MFT. Now I stumble on governance because of the hype (heck I use it no less than 15 times on this blog alone) but the idea of the lifecycle of a managed file transfer is intriguing. One of the things that has been more and more evident to me is that I have tended to have a silo’ed perspective when it comes to MFT suite vendors. It isn’t a bad thing, but it isn’t the best thing either. My perspective until about 6 months ago was that the majority of MFT suite vendors would come from the secure file transfer arena. For the most part this has been true. But in the last year I have been contacted by representatives from Biscom, Group Logic, Datamotion (Certified Mail), Thru Inc, Folder Maestro and others who have come from a more content and collaboration perspective. They tend to address another set of business concerns including:
- How can I share…?
- My team of individuals needs to manage…
- I need to check each transmission for ____ to stay in compliance….
These are all relevant issues and while some have been addressed in a recent research note, there is more to say. So what if I start to define the lifecycle of an MFT, let’s say we start with the sending person or application and what they need to be concerned with? Issues like compression, security of the data at rest etc. And then provisioning the end point which has a plethora of issues. I could identify all the steps, and I’m sure you have many more, and we could begin to understand that not all MFT vendors come from the same place and as such they all tackle various steps of that lifecycle. Would love to hear your thoughts, leave a comment! For sure, more soon. Oh and thanks again Bill.
-f
3 responses so far ↓
1 Greg Faubert // Nov 7, 2008 at 9:35 am
Great points, Frank. One of the things that we find virtually all customers have in common is that files rarely arrive in a ‘destination ready’ state. In fact, our contention is that the trip from the edge of the network to the ultimate recipient is where the ‘management’ lives in MFT.
2 Paul French // Dec 2, 2008 at 1:26 pm
“Managed” file transfer must allow for deeper collaboration than “Yes, your file made it” or “No, it didn’t.” We are seeing expansion in points of ingress into the enterprise, deeper requirements for action once the transfer is completed, better visibility of the movement in flight, and some intelligence about what the file may mean in a business context.
Paul French
VP, Product & Solutions Marketing
Axway Inc.
3 Van Glass // Feb 7, 2009 at 11:52 am
I think it is difficult to draw the line where MFT begins and ends. Getting data from point A to point B, compliance, and being able to centrally manage these processes is certainly key to MFT, yet equally important is how end-users can access and manage this data.
Over time I think we will see the definition of MFT expand to include web based collaboration and file sharing capabilities.
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