Industry: Higher Education
Organizations often have legacy systems in place for moving files around, and even though they lack good audit trails and security, there can be a tendency to keep those systems around too long. There are times though when outdated systems just aren't an option.
This was the situation Northwestern University, a prominent U.S. center for higher education based in Chicago, faced when the Solaris server running Unix that the university had relied on for years to handle their file transfers was dropped from support.
"We had custom scripts on it that handled transfers," recalled Ron Blitz, senior systems administrator in Northwestern's IT Administrative Systems Enabling Technologies department, "but the hardware was old and administration wanted us to transfer to a different platform with a better user interface anyway." In addition, some of the scripts the original server used were more than a decade old.
The Challenge: New Server Creates Opportunity to Replace Custom Scripts
Scot Milford, distributed application platform service manager at Northwestern, was among those tasked with finding a new solution. "We decided we needed to look for an application with good but easy reporting and something that provided a framework for standardization and more structure," he remembered. "We also needed something that wasn't overly complex and expensive. For example, IBM's offering in this area could handle all requirements for Fortune 500-type organizations, but we only need about five percent of that functionality. Extra functionality brings with it more operational complexity and cost, neither of which we wanted."
While some may not think an institution of higher learning to be a hive of business transactions, the truth is that colleges and universities need to move data files as much as any enterprise. "We have numerous systems we call enterprise applications," noted Blitz. "Student applications to the university, financial aid information, test scores, educational testing service results, W-2 forms and bank deposits, and Affordable Care Act data are some examples. A lot of very essential functionality of the university is funneled through our systems. At least 115 ongoing projects currently require FTP."
Central Hub for Encryption
Another requirement was to protect that data. "We use secure file transfer for almost everything. We encrypt everything sent to outside vendors, for example," Blitz emphasized. "The only exceptions are four jobs that transfer data from one database to another internally."
GoAnywhere MFT proved to be an excellent fit for Northwestern's file transfer needs. The product's workflow features replaced custom programs and scripts, single-function tools, and manual processes. The product automatically encrypted files with AES-256, compressed and decompressed files, connected to other secure FTP servers, and guaranteed file delivery with connection retries and file auto-resume. GoAnywhere connected to most database servers, including SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, IBM i, DB2, PostgreSQL, Informix, and Sybase. It also replicated data between database servers and translates between Excel, XML, delimited text, and flat-file or fixed-width file formats.
Northwestern University now runs GoAnywhere on a newer Linux 5 server and is happy with the results.
Connecting Systems Campus-Wide
"For every project it's helpful," Blitz pointed out. "For example, our parking garages wanted to change to an access-control system that lets people enter the garages by simply swiping their university IDs. GoAnywhere sends the encrypted university data to the company that runs the garage to validate users, and that automates controlling the parking garage entry arms in seconds. We haven't come across an alternative approach for automating that process in less time."
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Northwestern is also happy with GoAnywhere's ease-of-use characteristics. "I can set up a file transfer in minutes, particularly because I can duplicate similar jobs and tweak them for the new transfers as most only have minor differences from each other," Blitz emphasized. "Templates and the graphical user interface offer the ability to quickly customize FTP jobs that need it."
"I would say it's extremely flexible," Blitz continued. "It's easy to construct a script-like process without writing any code. Customizing transfers specific to each trading partner takes minutes and is often just a simple ‘drag-n-drop' or right-click away from being ready for Production."
Rapid Support Response
Northwestern is pleased with GoAnywhere's customer support. "The support team is good. They get back to us quickly and are very knowledgeable," Blitz said.
Overall, "we're very satisfied with GoAnywhere MFT," Blitz reported.
You can learn more about Northwestern University by visiting their website.
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