– Rohit Khanna, EVP, Global Strategy and Corporate Development, at SEEBURGER (www.seeburger.com) says:

No data center or IT manager would leave a corporate network without basic protections like a firewall, yet most companies lack adequate safeguards for exchanging large and/or sensitive business files. Case in point: last year’s email mistake by a Chevron employee that enabled the Wall Street Journal to publish confidential information on Chevron’s energy trading operations.

The problem lies with the deficiencies of conventional file sharing mechanisms. Neither FTP, YouSendIt nor Dropbox can enforce corporate and regulatory information security policies, for example. Email systems can do so only with the addition of data loss prevention (DLP) software, and even then only for files that do not exceed email attachment limits. That leaves large financial reports, Power Points, CAD files and much more without a safety net.

Also missing are the ability to guarantee or track file delivery, encrypt transmissions, route files through a workflow, and maintain a centralized audit trail for all file transfer activity including internal and external file exchange. FTP even lacks a way to trace senders and recipients in the event of a data leak.

These shortcomings and others lead to critical security, visibility, governance and regulatory compliance loopholes. They also result in hidden administrative costs. Organizations need to manage a patchwork of FTP servers, write and maintain FTP scripts to automate operations such as scheduling file transfers across multiple servers, and search multiple sources in an effort to determine who sent what to whom. As a result, ‘free’ file sharing is not free at all..

Taking control

At SEEBURGER, we recognized that we could solve these problems by expanding the capabilities of the business integration platform we have provided for more than two decades to automate supply chain communications such as purchase orders and advance shipping notices.

The result is SEEBURGER Managed File Transfer (SEE MFT) – a recent addition to our SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) that builds on our legacy technology to ensure secure and reliable data exchange. It also consolidates all file transfer activity both inside and outside an organization for easy management, auditability and cost savings.

With SEE MFT, all file transfers are handled with full governance, business process and policy management, and optional content filtering via data loss protection technology to ensure that the right file is transmitted to the right place at the right time based on corporate and regulatory policies. Other protections include automatic encryption, robust authentication, and guaranteed file delivery with checkpoint and restart capabilities as well as notification of transmission failures.

In addition, SEE MFT provides safeguards and efficiencies not available from any other file sharing solution. SEEBURGER exclusives include:

· Guaranteed file delivery even over unreliable network connections via a SEEBURGER-developed peer-to-peer protocol that bypasses the MFT server, thereby also eliminating server-related bottlenecks and scalability problems;

  • Automated endpoint provisioning for low-cost deployment and management, including the ability to dramatically reduce deployment time and expense by pre-populating individual PCs and servers with configuration information;
  • The consolidation of all business, supply chain and trading partner file transfer activity in a single view for easy file traceability, simpler IT infrastructure, single-vendor accountability, and a lower total cost of ownership.
  • This industry-first ability to track and manage all file transfer activity from a single interface eliminates the separate management of system-to-system, human-to-system and human-to-human data exchanges required by other MFT solutions. It also frees IT staff of the need to administer separate systems for unstructured files and structured B2B/EDI transaction messages such as purchase orders.

Other unique SEE MFT features range from support for unlimited file sizes and built-in business process management support to a built-in translation engine enabling transmitted data to be converted to the appropriate ERP or other format without requiring separate transfer agents that can trigger outside processes.

Safe and compliant

With these and other capabilities, SEE MFT helps enterprises reduce the threat of misdirected, late, lost or stolen data; ensure compliance with government, industry, and customer privacy and security mandates such as HIPAA, GLBA, PCI DSS and Sarbanes Oxley; and provide full visibility of all file transfer activity to streamline supply chain and business operations.

SEE MFT is available in four different deployment options — on-premise software, private cloud, public cloud or managed services. More information is available at www.seeburger.com/mft or by contacting SEEBURGER at 1-800-786-5998.