With the employment environment changing nearly every week, the ability of teams to do more with less – whether that’s a smaller budget or head count – is more important than ever. Incorporating smart technology solutions, such as managed file transfer (MFT) is a proactive, efficient move to help your organization better secure the lifeblood of your operations – your data.
By taking advantage of technology to improve operational efficiency, organizations can maximize their resources and minimize the stress on employees when they identify and eliminate wastes of time, resources, and money while improving overall quality of products and services, according to Forbes. Streamlining processes as well as automating tasks and using technology to optimize workflows are suggested as some of the best ways to achieve better efficiency.
Let MFT Do the Heavy Lifting for Encryption
Locking down your sensitive, business-critical data is a no-brainer in today’s cybersecurity environment. If you’re burdening your employee users with having to manually encrypt each document file they send, you may be risking that data with every hit of the ‘send’ button,” noted Chris Spargen, Senior Manager, Solutions Engineering at Fortra. “However, organizations that use a robust and secure file transfer solution can automatically apply encryption protocols to each file to safeguard it at rest and in transit, taking a large share of that responsibility off the users table, and helping ensure encryption is applied each and every time.”
GoAnywhere MFT can apply any of these encryption protocols to your files to help ensure their security enroute to their destination:
In addition, GoAnywhere also secures folders using AES-256 encryption, which automatically encrypts data as it’s written or added to designated folders.
Related Reading: How Encryption Works: Everything You Need to Know
Create Automatic Workflows to Streamline Processes and Trigger Actions
With an MFT solution, like Fortra’s GoAnywhere MFT, you can incorporate automated workflows instead of cumbersome, time-consuming, and error-prone processes. You can set parameters and perform many of the processes around your business-critical file transfers or exchanges and create endless workflows (called projects). Each project can contain a series of tasks or actions that can trigger a specific process. Intuitive wizards and templates mean no time or money is lost to specific programming needs nor are any special technical skills needed. With GoAnywhere, all project definitions are stored in a central database, which can be managed by your authorized users and applications.
If you are looking for a solution to automate your workflows, be sure it has a built-in Scheduler to easily run these projects at the time of your choosing – by the minute, hour, day of week, and more. Another great solution is event-driven automation, when a file becomes available for processing, or a user uploads a file, GoAnywhere can automatically invoke these projects for processing. GoAnywhere comes pre-set with more than 100 built-in but you are not limited to those – you can create as many custom tasks as you need to take the burden off of your teams. Tasks can include actions used to send or grab data, encrypt and decrypt files, extract, transform, or load data into an array of file formats or database tables, provide updates on file transfer status, and mor.
On-Demand Webinar:10 Ways to Improve Processes with Advanced Workflows
What Can MFT Simplify to Improve Efficiency?
When organizations move from manual to automated file transfers, they can streamline a wide variety of tasks, saving teams time and frustration and reducing the risks of human error. A few tasks to turn over to MFT:
- Run batch or multiple file transfers simultaneously vs. needing to manually export files to each recipient on an individual basis
- Create audit reports needed for compliance on all file transfer activity
- Retrieve files, enabling more efficient and secure collaboration
- Alerting users should a file transfer not occur as intended before your recipient knows
- Get auto-resume of failed transfers to lessen the fallout of a file transfer that is interrupted by network connectivity issues, etc.
Simplify Your Security Measures with MFT
“It can be tough to keep up with the many and ever-changing security measures needed to protect your priceless data,” noted Spargen. “With secure file transfer in place however, you can put the necessary steps in place that can more easily cover many of the critical bases needed to combat security risks to your data, without overtaxing your users. The key to effective security adoption is making it easy on your users.”
With MFT, you can take care of key security measures through the software platform. Here’s just a few of them:
- Generate audit logs of all file transfer activity to help meet compliance requirements
- Trigger alerts so you know whenever a monitored event occurs
- Establish parameters around password users and expiration dates
- Filter connections with Allow and Block List at the global and user level
- Block Brute-Force and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks with an automatic IP blacklist
- Authenticate SFTP connections with passwords and/or SSH keys
Make Shorter Work of Meeting Compliance Requirements
Nearly every industry needs to comply with at least a few industry security and compliance standards such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, the GDPR, GLBA, SOX, and FISMA, as well as state and privacy regulations. Ensuring that the data you need to prove compliance can be a huge task for IT teams. However, comprehensive MFT solutions can make gathering and processing that data much easier.
“Compliance requirements often outline the bare minimum in terms of what organizations should be doing to safeguard data of their customers and trading partners,” noted Spargen. “Getting to that minimum standard, and hopefully going above and beyond to protect sensitive data should be the goal, and that’s made easier with technology such as secure file transfer. With solid solutions in place, you can go a long way in avoiding interception and tampering of your data and help reduce the risks of data breachers. GoAnywhere protects files in transit and at rest and our helps keep that protection around files wherever they travel.”
GoAnywhere helps with compliance in a number of critical ways, including incorporating file transfer encryption technologies, detailed audit logs and reporting, monitoring of file transfers, providing extensive, granular user permissions, and with flexible ways to securely exchange files.
Boost Efficiency with GoAnywhere MFT
Do more with less when you take advantage of the time and resource savings gained with a robust managed file transfer solution, like GoAnywhere MFT. Let your employees focus on higher-level tasks, and ensure sensitive files are protected at rest and in motion at the same time.
