MFT solutions typically include features such as encryption, authentication, and access controls to ensure that files are securely transmitted and received. They also provide tracking and auditing capabilities, enabling businesses to monitor file transfers and ensure compliance with regulations and policies.

MFT solutions can be implemented on-premises, in the cloud, or through a hybrid approach, depending on the organization’s specific requirements. They can also integrate with other systems and applications, such as enterprise content management systems and workflow automation tools, to streamline business processes and improve efficiency.

Overall, managed file transfer is an essential tool for businesses that need to transfer large amounts of data securely and efficiently, while also meeting compliance and regulatory requirements.

Most enterprises implement multiple job scheduling solutions depending on platform type, application, data center and business owner. Aside from standards like cron, at, SAP’s, CCMS, i5/OS Advanced Job Scheduler, Oracle’s DMBS_Scheduler, HP’s Netbatch for NonStop servers, and others, more than 30 vendors add job scheduling solutions to the enterprise mix. While a diverse mix of job scheduling software may address the needs of individual business owners, that same mix presents a barrier to consolidated job scheduling.

File Transfer: Exorbitant Pricing and Non-Compliant Adoption

Despite growing budget constraints, many organizations cling to expensive enterprise-class file transfer solutions – some requiring dedicated connections. Often, the file transfer software is so costly that an organization deploys it only sparingly, allowing internal users to initiate FTP – a serious issue of audit compliance. Although there are a great many solutions for B2B communications security, MFT satisfies basic needs with minimal complexity. Simply put, MFT solutions are frequently overpriced.

Learn more. Read the white paper.

1. Acquisitions  – For many companies that integrate acquisitions, consolidating IT tools such as scheduling is not their highest priority. Although, it will save money in the long run, it is a big project that poses risks. Consequently, scheduling staff members are burdened with managing multiple schedulers.
2. Departmental Purchasing – The lack of centralized purchasing or company-wide standards often results in the independent departmental acquisition of different job scheduling solutions that are unable to interoperate with each other and existing tools.
3. Access to Tools – Application departments circumvent standard tools and use easier scheduling tools such as Cron. It is simple and easy to set up a Cron tab or schedule a process in Windows, but it is only a quick fix. Moreover, these one-off fixes decrease overall business visibility.
4. Built-in application capabilities: This is one of the biggest culprits. Companies deploy applications and tools, such as backup products, due to the perceived benefits of a self-contained system that can be managed by its own tools. This thinking ignores the fact that most applications are not self-contained. In fact, they “touch” other applications by exchanging data and have dependencies based on the overall business workflow. Implementing these “point” solutions prevents the ability to control business workflows from end-to-end.
5. Lack of management mandate – Without clear mandates from senior management, there is no ability to enforce centralized control. Thus, departments and application developers will take the path of least resistance.

In many cases, sooner or later, IT operations inherit these different applications and tools and are stuck with managing them. With vendor-independent technology, IT organizations can avoid these pitfalls, while saving money, time and resources.

Two key findings?

• Employee attitudes about their employees affect the level of compliant vs. non-compliant behavior.
• Employees do not believe their organizations provide ample training or adequate policies to inform them about data protection and security practices.

So, how does your company stack up against the percentages? 61 percent of end users transfer confidential data onto a USB stick and 71 percent says that others do it. What if there was a way to easily transfer sensitive, proprietary and confidential company and client information without using the number 1 cause of lost data? A secure, ad hoc Managed File Transfer solution can let your employees send up to 2GB of confidential information of files without even leaving their email client. No training, no ramp-up time and the ability to track messages and files. Sound too good to be true? Learn more.

Paper records are no longer acceptable for your organization.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and the associated provisions under the Health Information Technology  for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH),  have highlighted the need to address security and privacy across our healthcare system.

The report goes on to state that “the way to stop medical identity theft confusion is to improve patient identification and provide enhanced data production through strong authentication and encryption.” How can a healthcare organization achieve this? B2B Managed File Transfer. Protection of patient information does not happen just inside the four walls of your organization. Think of the providers, health record banks, health insurance and hospital Web portals.

The key is two-factor authentication and data encryption. Are you employing these security methodologies at your organization?

As a business professional, there are a number of tools from which to choose for communication and collaboration. It would be impossible to conduct business everyday without email. Additionally, you use solutions such as FTP to send large files to colleagues, business partners and clients. In a hurry, you may use expensive, expedited shipping services or a courier for your confidential and proprietary documents.

While there are many forms of communication, do you have 100 percent confidence that the content of the message or file being exchanged is secure? While these services, “get the job done” in most cases, they ineffective, costly and provide no guarantee that your documents will arrive securely or on time. So how can you transfer messages and files securely, instantly and a reasonable price?

A secure business communications solution can be used to exchange information or files quickly and securely inside and outside of your organization. As easy-to-use as email, a secure business communications solution, enables you to send important, confidential or proprietary information instantly. Just type a message or attach a file and click to send.

Learn more.

As an IT manager, are you constantly concerned with how and what information your employees are exchanging  within and outside your organization? With a secure business communications solution, you gain visibility and control over your organization’s business communications with process status, exceptions and transactions and trends. Additionally, deploying via SaaS provides an affordable cost of ownership and quick return on investment due to ease of use and quick implementation.

Finally, providing your business users with a way to communicate securely and seamlessly without disrupting their daily activities enables you to relax knowing they aren’t circumventing IT by uses one-off, insecure communication methods to get their job done.

Do you know how your users send out confidential or sensitive information?

For example, assume you have two schedulers and each has its own proprietary agent technology. These schedulers each need to run processes across shared systems. Without vendor-independent technology, this would require a proprietary agent from each of the two schedulers installed on each of the systems, which not only creates significant cost but also  causes complexity for scheduling and operations staff. Vendor-independent technology can speak to each of these systems, requiring only one agent, while receiving processing requests from the two schedulers. This significantly simplifies the communication in your job scheduling environment.

By using vendor-independent technology, there is no need to retrain employees on new schedulers. You can re-use your existing technology investments in software, processes and skill sets, while simplifying your environment. You gain control over your job scheduling infrastructure while providing greater visibility in your production environment.

Replacing or even acquiring additional legacy scheduling agents is a costly, daunting and resource-draining task. Vendor-independent technology enables you to avoid these risks while streamlining, optimizing and modernizing your Job Scheduling environment without replacing a single agent. Not to mention you can add agents to meet your growing requirements at the fraction of the cost of purchasing additional agents from existing scheduling vendor. All of which significantly reduces cost and increases your return on investment.

Are you throwing money away with legacy scheduler agents?

Vendor-independent technology works alongside your existing schedulers and provides you with one single point of management and control for your entire environment. No matter what the scheduling tool, every agent can be controlled and monitored from one central location, providing visibility across your entire workflow. Vendor-independent technology allows you to execute programs outside of Job Scheduling, making it more than just a scheduling agent; it’s an automation tool.

Costs can increase because your scheduling vendor bases agent cost on multiple CPUs. With technology-independent technology, whether it’s one CPU or 20, the cost remains the same. You are not locked down by a particular vendor, platform or scheduling system. You gain value and additional functionality at a reasonable price that is not offered by Job Scheduling vendors.

A simplified job scheduling environment using vendor-independent technology.

For example, suppose Scheduler A needs to communicate with three different backend applications. The cost of purchasing agents for those backend applications from Vendor A is cost prohibitive. Consequently, IT decides to use vendor-independent technology to complement the existing scheduler, enabling Scheduler A to communicate with all three backend applications at a much lower cost.

A key benefit to this approach is that you can leverage your existing investment in Scheduler A at reduced risk, cost and effort. Additionally, vendor-independent technology increases your business’s ability to support emerging technologies such as service-oriented architecture and other Web-based technologies.

Secure all points of contact with partners.

The report adds, “there have been instances in which partner connections were used to steal data or sabotage computer systems. These breaches show us that enterprises must stay vigilant about security, even in dealing with their closest and most trusted suppliers.” Other findings? “The difference between employee and partner risk varies by industry – in food service, partners accounted for as many as 70 percent of breaches; in the technology arena, partners accounted for only 18 percent.”

Organizations must be wary of:

• the introduction of malware
• confidential software theft
• the data at risk – proprietary, intellectual property to private customer information

While concrete corporate security policies, firewalls and other security measures, help alleviate the threat, how do you ensure B2B partner and trading partner security is achieved while still optimizing those partnerships, making it easier for your partners to do business with you?

B2B Managed File Transfer – From secure ad-hoc file transfer to EDI to enterprise-wide Managed File Transfer a complete B2B communications solution can prevent these breaches from happening to you. Because whether the breach is accidental or intentional, the damage has still been done.

Why? Most people don’t like change. Many people, may in fact, have a vested interest in an application, whether homegrown, customized or proprietary. The article states, “custom products cost more to maintain than commercial alternatives, if they exist.” To successfully consolidate application across the enterprise, all affected departments need to be on board. This often becomes challenging, especially in time of mergers & acquisitions, when tensions are high and most staff members are thinking about redundant positions or departments.  Also, preferred applications or custom-built applications will be met with much opposition due to the resources and time put into developing the app. The question becomes: “Is there business value in the app?”

Consolidation drivers are clear: reduce cost and complexity. Biddick writes, “The more complex the software and systems involved, the greater the return for consolidation.”

Applications that are interoperable can bring further consolidation. What if you were able to consolidate your file transfer along with your job scheduling processes? The result would be increased visibility enterprise-wide, better communications between departments, less complexity, and ultimately affecting the bottom line.

The problem with P2P software is that it is usually improperly installed on a computer that contains sensitive data.  While the use of the P2P software might be as benign as sharing music and video files, if installed improperly, the P2P software makes all data on the computer visible. Healthcare is not the only industry that has been burned by this issue – businesses and government alike face the same problem. So how do you securely share movies, music, photos and other files without jeopardizing the security of sensitive information? Ad-hoc Managed File Transfer. Similar to P2P networks ad-hoc managed file transfer solution enables you to send large files up to 2GB without disrupting sensitive data that may be on your machine.

Moreover, due to the secure nature of Managed File Transfer, you can send proprietary, confidential or sensitive information and not just large files. The ability to send messages and files securely with the ability to track when the recipient has received the message or file, gives the end user more control over how they send information and gives businesses, healthcare organizations and the government a secure person-to-person file sharing tool that prevents the leak of private information.

The results of the survey found that about one out of five hotels still uses an antiquated hub-based network, an arrangement that is inherently flawed in terms of security. Also, hotels are providing unsecured wi-fi connections that are not encrypted and are subject to hacking. In fact, just six of the 39 wireless properties were using encryption. So, how can hotels secure their customers’ private information and communications? While the article suggests a series of steps (all good measures), additional security measures should be taken. Between hotel suppliers, customers and employees, secure communication should be established both internally within the hotel and external to other business partners. A complete solution from encrypted ad hoc information and file transfer to an enterprise-wide solution that goes beyond the four walls of the hotel is necessary to provide the most secure infrastructure possible.

Have you experienced a security breach while staying at a hotel?

How can you prevent this from happening to your organization?

Security measures such as firewalls are not enough to prevent a data breach and while FTP might be a “free” file transfer solution, it’s not secure. The key to ensure a data breach doesn’t happen to your business is B2B Managed File Transfer and Communications.

• Ensure security throughout the entire file transfer process
• Verify that only authorized customers and partners can send data into your network
• Protect your mission-critical data in and out of the DMZ
• Verify authorization before data is passed through your internal firewall
• Secure ad hoc communications including large files and attachments

How protected is your network?

Kentucky recently suffered a data breach with the Our Lady Peace hospital compromising thousands of patients’ personal information.  The hospital did notify the patients, which was very positive in a state where it is not made mandatory.  However, it’s clear that breaches can occur anywhere and thus, everywhere needs to have some laws in place.

I’m certainly not calling out states to force companies to reveal data breaches, but when someone’s data is in the wrong hands, it’s important for them to know so that they can take the necessary action to prevent any problems.  This has nothing to do with company integrity.  This is about people who may suffer a fate of financial downfall or complete identity theft with the loss of their data.

States without data breach laws are soon to follow as their ranks shrink.  With Mississippi enacting data breach legislation this year, it is becoming apparent that data security is necessary in this increasingly data-filled world.

As we continue to discuss Data Breach Laws in our “Law of the Land” blog series, look for your own state to learn more about what laws are in place.

• Paper breaches account for nearly 26 percent of known breaches (an increase of 46 percent over 2008)
• Business sector climbed from 21 percent to 41 percent between 2006 to 2009, the worst sector performance by far
• Malicious attacks have surpassed human error for the first time in three years
• Out of 498 breaches, only six reported that they had either encryption or other strong security features protecting the exposed data

What will the stats be for 2010? Take Preventative Measures.

The article goes on, stating, “Insanity might well be defined as repeating the same action again and again, and expecting a different outcome.” So, the ITRC compiled a list related to how businesses are addressing data breaches and security:

• Insanity 1 – Electronic Breaches: After all the articles about hacking and the ever-growing cost of a breach, why isn’t encryption being used to protect personal identifying information? Proprietary information almost always seems to be well protected. Why not our customer/consumer personal identifying information (PII)?
• Insanity 2 – Paper breaches: Why aren’t more state legislators passing laws about rendering paper documents unreadable prior to disposal if they contain PII? Do we dare ask that those laws be actually enforceable? Perhaps we are waiting for paper breaches to reach 35% of the total.
• Insanity 3 – Breaches happen: Deal with it! You will get notification letters. Breach notification does not equal identity theft. Let’s stop the “blame game” and instead require breached entities to report breach incidents via a single public website. This would allow analysts (and law enforcement) to look for trends and link crimes to a single ring or hacker faster.
• Insanity 4 – A Breach is a Breach: Let’s not kid ourselves. “Risk of harm” is not a useful standard for determining if the public and consumers should be notified about a breach, especially if the company involved gets to define “risk of harm.” If it is your #$@%2 SSN that is out on the Internet, do YOU think there is “risk of harm?” Some companies might say “no.”
• Insanity 5 – Data on the Move: You will notice that statistically this is a bright spot, with a decreasing incidence in the past 3 years. But, really! This is 100% avoidable, either through use of encryption, or other safety measures. Laptops, portable storage devices and briefcases full of files, outside of the workplace, are still “breaches waiting to happen.” With tiered permissions, truncation, redaction and other recording tools, PII can be left where it belongs – behind encrypted walls at the workplace.

So how are you protecting your data internally and externally?

Growth is easy when you can on-board new partners quickly and securely. You can provide your partners with tools that make it easier for them to do business with you. In a business environment that is full of mergers and acquisitions and technology consolidations, data management is critical. The need  for an easy and manageable way to keep control becomes more and more apparent. Managed File Transfer is one of the easiest ways to get your data under control, ensuring it’s secure while in transit – every  step of the way.

B2B Managed File Transfer provides security at the highest level while also providing visibility to transactions. Meet necessary compliance and regulatory standards, manage your data exchanges with 100 percent up-time, merge disparate systems to create a seamless flow of information and position your enterprise for growth. Additionally, B2B MFT allows you to manage your data exchanges through secure, multi-industry protocols. This increased security also resolves ad hoc communication issues, including large files or attachments containing sensitive information.

How does complexity affect your business?

Additionally, unnecessary complexity leads to more money spent on IT. There are always investments in new technology needed to help businesses stay current on compete. The problem is that the money available to IT is limited. Money that could be spent on staying competitive is instead spent on operating a complex, multiple scheduling infrastructure, depleting the budget for more revenue-driving technologies.

Moreover, the complexity of multiple scheduling environments affects the mindset of IT. The effort required by IT to maintain a multiple scheduling environment requires it to focus resources on managing the day-to-day issues instead of preparing for the evolving needs of the business.

Want to learn more about how to solve these issues? Read the article.

“A majority of organizations have lost sensitive personal information, and among these organizations, the biggest causes are internal and therefore something they could potentially control. This suggests accountability for and ownership of how sensitive data is used may be lacking in many organizations.” The report goes on state that, “larger organizations struggle more to prevent breaches than smaller ones – likely because, with many more employees and more geographically dispersed operations, the opportunities for data to be lost or compromised is greater.”

The report found that 70 percent of organizations with more than 75,000 employees have experienced a loss of sensitive personal information compared to 40 percent of organizations with fewer than 500 people. Internal issues – employees (48 percent) and business or system failure (57 percent) – were cited most often the source of data breaches – a stark contrast to the common perception that external forces are the biggest threats to security and privacy.  Reasons for internal causes of data loss?

• Lack of adequate policies and training programs
• Lack of adequate controls – employees have too much access to sensitive data
• Not having a full understanding of data flows across the organization

From an employee standpoint, there are simple measures that can be taken to ensure sensitive, proprietary or confidential information is not compromised. By giving employees an easy-to-use tool to encrypt and protect data, you are one step ahead of the game.

For larger organizations, the task can be more complicated. A large data center may have various protocols for sending information both internally and externally: FTP, SFTP, home-grown solutions just to name a few. Many large organizations might not even be aware of all the protocols used to transfer data. This causes silos of information and a general lack of secure file transfer. Solutions do exist to securely transfer data and files enterprise-wide, while setting up user authentication, controls and policies.

Do you have internal policies or controls set up to ensure the security of your data?