Secure and Automate Your File Transfers for IBM i

Ash Giddings: So, good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever you're dialing in from today to today's HelpSystems webinar, Secure and Automate Your File Transfers for IBM i. Maybe your organization is using legacy programs or unsecure processes to transfer files in and out of the IBM i, and it can be time-consuming maintaining and writing transfer scripts, solving connection issues made with trading partners and ensure the data is protected every step of the way. So today, you're going to learn how to simplify and protect your file transfers via a modern award-winning tool. With me today is Heath Kath. Heath, would you like to introduce yourself?

Heath: Absolutely. Hi, everyone, welcome. Yeah, my name's Heath Kath. I'm a Senior Solutions Consultant here at HelpSystems. I work for the GoAnywhere Managed File Transfer Product Team here around the pre-sales doing demos, proof of concepts, installations, but I've actually been on the IBM i for 28 years. I've been with HelpSystems for 18 years. I've actually worked with the SQL, that Data Access Tool, and also the Robot products, so I've done a lot of different things, wore a lot of different hats. But thanks again, everyone, welcome.

Ash: Thank you, Heath. I wear a similar number of hats, but different products. I've been with HelpSystems for 15 years, and pretty much involved in and around IBM i since day one. And, I'm lucky enough to be a member of the Common Europe Advisory Council, where we get to meet and greet IBM two or three times a year and talk about what a fantastic platform it is, and the direction that IBM is taking it. So, here's a little bit about the agenda.

Before we get started today, I'll provide a brief "who HelpSystems is and what we do" before I hand over to Heath where he will start talking about the most common challenges we come across when working with customers in the area of file transfers. Next, we'll highlight some of the best practices from getting files from A to B, whether this is within your organization, with your customers, or maybe with your trading partners. Heath will then provide you with a high level overview of the solution before embarking on a live demonstration. Also, all being well, we'll have time for questions, so feel free to use the chat feature. Not the chat feature, the question feature at any time in GoToWebinar. Also, there'll be a survey at the end of the webinar for you to provide us with some feedback, and also to ask any further questions.

About HelpSystems

So, HelpSystems started way back in the 80s with the much-loved and much used Robot Schedule, but we've come a long way since then. We now have well over 18,000 customers worldwide in every industry imaginable, close to, probably exceeding $300 million revenue with offices all over the globe. In those places where we don't have an office, we work through local partners, and they're invaluable to help us understand the local culture. We probably now have probably over 1,000 employees and staff tenure tends to be in excess of nine years, which I think is incredible. Now, HelpSystems is not just married to one industry. While this is an impressive list of household names, it's just a very small cross section of our worldwide list of partners, and almost 99% of guiding where customers renew their maintenance each and every year.

Security & Automation Solutions

So HelpSystems: we've grown both organically and through acquisition over the years, and now have two definite areas of expertise; security, where we protect business-critical data with automated security solutions that help you stay ahead of today's ever-changing threats. And, intelligent automation with robotic process automation, workload automation, transfer automation, which ultimately increase productivity and add value to the business. We also have many strategic partners as you'd imagine for a company of our size like IBM, Microsoft, SAP, et cetera. We also belong to IT organizations such as ISACA and PCI for security.

2020 IBM i Marketplace Survey

You may have seen this. This was the sixth annual IBM i marketplace survey results for IBM i, and we had in excess of 500 customers respond this year. One of our questions that we ask, and we've been asking it since I think 2015, is what are your top priorities for the coming year? And, security has been at the top since being included as an option and has increased steadily from 33%. That said it was an area where they need to spend time. 33% back in 2016 to 77% in the latest survey in 2020. Security and the need to secure is not going to go away. Heath, is this what you find on the ground?

Heath: Absolutely. It's just amazing the growth and the consistency around security being the number one.

Ash: Yeah, not going to go away. There just doesn't seem to be a day go by where you don't open a website and you see that somebody else has been hacked, and they do tend to be household names now. Something else we produce, you may have seen this. This is the State of IBM i Security Study. Again, we produce this every year. We've been doing it for 17 years, and this is compiled and based on the anonymous results of literally hundreds of free security scans that we perform. The security scan, it's free, it takes a few minutes to run and we have it for IBM i, we have AX, we have it for Linux. I'll post the links into the chat as we go through the session. It gives you great insights and sees how your machine and your environment compare against equivalents in the market. So Heath, over to you to talk about some of the common challenges that you see with file transfers in and around i.

Common File Transfer Challenges

Heath: Sounds good Ash, thank you. Yeah, exactly. Now when it comes to your file transfers, ensuring security and compliance, while making processes efficient can be a very big challenge. I'm curious and I look at this list here, do any of these file transfer challenges sound familiar to you guys? Like first of all, here, number one there the first one, human error is a big problem. Unfortunately, many companies are still using PC based tools to transfer files and since this is often a manual process, it's prone to those human errors just naturally, so it's a big risk.

For instance, what if a user sends the wrong file or forgets to send the file? Sends it at the wrong time? All these factors could be a very key important area, important to order, to key financial data and any delays, any mishaps can really cost you a lot of money to you, to your customers, your vendors, et cetera. What if the user downloads or uploads the file to the wrong trading partner? Maybe they accidentally sent the wrong pricing list with special discounts that were really intended for another customer. Well, that could be bad for your business. The fourth one there, what if it actually contains sensitive data and that user forgets to encrypt it before transmitting the information? Another thought, who is going to run those manual transfers when the primary user's gone for the day? For instance, what if they're sick or on vacation? These are the risks that many of us face today with those manual file transfer processes.

Secondly, a lot of IT departments have a lot of inefficiencies with their file transfers. They may also be using unsecured technology, some old technology like FTP, or using traditional email to transmit those files. Now, in order to automate file transfers, a lot of companies have built FTP scripts on their systems. However, these scripts have many downfalls. One big problem with those is that your trading partner passwords are often stored in the clear, which can make those servers very vulnerable to attacks if hackers get ahold of them. FTP scripts are also written by programmers, and we all know that's a very expensive resource. To write the script properly, the programmer should be able to code and include in those scripts to perform those auto retries, self connections, send out alerts, write out really good detail logs. All of this takes time, all of this really costs additional money, cost to it.

Plus, every time something changes, say for a trading partner such as a new IP address for the server or maybe the password or the file name changes, well, then a programmer has to get involved to make those changes within their scripts. These are additional costs and they can really add up over time, and distract your expensive IT resources from their other priority projects. We have talked to a lot of organizations that have hundreds or even thousands of FTP scripts that have really become unmanageable and almost impossible to really maintain over time.

The third challenge is a lack of encryption, the data at rest or in motion. And another problem with file transfer today for a lot of organizations is that they may have an end user that jeopardizes sensitive data by downloading it first from a secure corporate server, but then to a less secure PC or a laptop, making that data much more vulnerable to attacks. Maybe for instance, the user has to download that ACH file from the server before they use their PC tool to send it to the bank. In that instance, the user may forget to remove the file from their PC after they have transmitted it and since PCs and laptops are more vulnerable to those attacks, they could be again, a really weak area for you guys to keeping sensitive stuff secure.

Also, email is frequently used to send sensitive data. When a user sends a file as a regular attachment in an email, that attachment is not encrypted by default, which makes it very susceptible to theft. The users, they have their own free file sharing service. Maybe it's Dropbox, they are using to send files through without any controls or audit trails. This has really become a nightmare for IT departments. They can't really manage it, they can't see what's going on. Without having good internal policies in place for your end users regarding your file transfers, you really increase the loss or risk of handling sensitive data through one of those, or one of these different unsecured methods.

The fourth thing here, the challenge is the lack of being informed, no error alerts, and maybe no auditing capability at all in the products. Finally, another big problem with file transfer today is a lot of scripts and PC tools just don't have good alerts when a transfer fails. Sometimes you may have to wait for your trading partner to call and alert you that they did not receive the file, and maybe now it's too late. With these legacy tools, there are often no logs what and where the files were sent. This is becoming a real issue with auditors since many organizations cannot tell or prove what sensitive files are leaving the organization.

Best Practices for Secure, Efficient File Transfers

For instance, can you quickly tell what files have left your network on a given date or time period and by which users or where they really were sent? Because of these vulnerabilities and lack of reporting, the lack of logging that's really needed, it's become really difficult to meet those stricter compliance requirements using those traditional tools and processes. What we recommend first of all, is that you really move away from the standard FTP and email for sending sensitive files. Instead, use secure protocols like Secure FTP, AS2 and HTTPS as they offer really strong authentication and encryption technologies nowadays, to fully protect your confidential files. Those files should not only be encrypted when transmitted across the internet and even within your own internal network, they should also be encrypted at rest whenever possible, especially if you're staging those files in your DMZ, which is the public facing portion of your network.

The automation of file transfers will remove the manual processes and the need for vulnerable PC tools. These automated process should alert you immediately when file transfers fail, instead of having to wait for that trading partner to tell you that the files were not received. To help meet the compliance requirements, you should be able to keep at least a year's worth of audit logs or file transfer activity. Plus, you should be able to quickly generate reports on those audit logs, maybe filtering by user, time range, file name and so forth.

And then to bring it all together, we really recommend that you look for what's called a Managed File Transfer product, also known as an MFT. MFT solutions allow organizations to control and secure their file transfers through a centralized framework. MFT covers all aspects of the file transfers within your enterprise and with your trading partners. That's going to include any batched transfers between systems, as well as ad hoc file transfers initiated by your end users, either with other users or with other back-end servers.

Now, MFT solutions provide you the automation that you need for the file transfers, protecting that data with strong encryption protocols. At the same time, giving you some nice detailed audit trails that you can follow up on as needed to make sure things are secure and that they're being performed as they really need to. So again, MFT really brings it all together to help you solve many of those challenges that I mentioned earlier.

Cybersecurity for IBM i

Ash: Brilliant, thank you Heath. So, we've leveraged our experience in the security industry to build an impressive portfolio of powerful security solutions, solutions designed to provide critical functionality to companies in every vertical. These solutions have been designed specifically to help satisfy regulatory compliance requirements, as well as internal corporate policy, and each of them extends and leverages the the integrated security infrastructure that's already found in IBM i. The best and most popular way to understand where your gaps are in your IBM i security today is to run a security scan, down at the bottom here. This gives you an easy to read PDF that you can take away with you, which we can help you understand with the aid of one of our technicians. Heath, over to you to introduce GoAnywhere.

Heath: Sounds good. Yeah, take advantage of the security scan. That's awesome, it really is. All right, well thanks Ash. This leads me into the GoAnywhere Managed File Transfer Solution. It's here at HelpSystems, we've developed it. We sell it around the world and we really do believe it's the best enterprise level MFT solution in the marketplace, and there's some actually nice reports to back that up. This diagram gives you a quick overview of its capabilities of whom we can share files with, allowing you to share files with all the different servers out there.

GoAnywhere MFT Overview

GoAnywhere can be installed on most operating systems. You can install it on prem or within your own cloud environment, and then you can use it to connect up with all your various trading partners from customers, vendors, internal systems and so forth. You can also connect to many Cloud Connectors like Box and Dropbox, Amazon, OneDrive, SharePoint, JAMS, Automate, et cetera. There's a lot out there. You can use GoAnywhere to initiate those file transfers to send and to accept files from your trading partners, so it handles both inbound and outbound file transfers through both batch and ad hoc requests that can be initiated throughout the product.

GoAnywhere's mission is really to simplify and secure data transfers across all environments, applications and platforms through one interface. Transfers files from server to server, person to person, really anything in between. And just to summarize this slide, because I know there's a lot information here, but this left-hand side, this left-hand bullet list here is really about GoAnywhere acting as a client where you're initiating the pushing and pulling of docs from your local file system, your remote servers and your trading partner's servers. This module is known as the Advanced Workflows. It's all about automation, automation of your file transfers and more. There are over 150 different tasks built into it, allowing you to easily encrypt, move the documents, reading your files, writing the data out to Excel or CSV, flat file, XML. And, we can also read and write EDI X12 files. So, there's a lot we can do on this left-hand side when initiating the file transfers.

Now, the right side is the server side, the listener for your customers, trading partners to connect to your server to upload and/or download files based on their permissions that you define. There are a few actually features in this list that allow the users to easily share files maybe through a web client, online forums, applications, Secure Mail, et cetera. So again, it's all about making things easy and secure for your users.

At the same time, we do have some built in auditing. We have the advanced audit reports, automatic customizable alerts that can really keep you in the know, inform you of what's going on in your server. We also have some commands and APIs that allow you to easily run projects from your own enterprise, from your own command line, so it gives you some more control. Maybe you need to kick off, or would like to kick off this workflow, this file transfer from your own Robot Schedule. You can automate JAMS, the IBM i Job Scheduler, we can help you with that. And I'll show you a lot more, demo will go a little more in-depth around that area, but you'll hopefully like what I have to show you today here in just a little bit.

GoAnywhere is a multi-platform solution. You can install it on the IBM i, a Linux, a Windows, even a Mac. There is even a new option of deployment that I will bring up very soon here. I'll keep that one in suspense. Both batch and ad hoc requests can be handled by the product. All file transfer activities are being audited, coming, going, et cetera, the user's activity. And, we have a browser-based interface for administration and monitoring, allowing you to use the browser of your choice, so you do not need to install any desktop client on your systems. Now again, as I mentioned earlier, we do provide APIs. If you have a remote system that needs to automatically launch GoAnywhere transfers from a command line or your own enterprise scheduler, you will have that capability. We have these commands available for the IBM I, AIX, Windows, and also Linux. You can use a web service call to make a request to GoAnywhere to kick off those jobs.

Earlier I mentioned that we also allow for inbound connections. GoAnywhere can be set up as a listener, maybe for Secure FTP, HTTPS, AS2, et cetera. Also, files can be encrypted in motion. You can also encrypt them at rest using AES 256-bit encryption. For those that work with a federal government or require a stronger encryption, we do provide an option to use FIPS 140-2 for that higher level of encryption if needed. It's only going to use those secure and validated ciphers to help protect that data at rest and in motion. And built into GoAnywhere, we have what we call a KMS, a Key Management System that allows you to import, export, create and manage your PGP keys and SSH keys that you need for your Secure FTP connections, as well as any certificates that you may use for FTPS or HTTPS connections.

The admin permissions are defined by the roles that you assign them, really defining what these admins can see and what they can perform within GoAnywhere. For instance, you could actually set up some administrators that can set up new jobs, these workflows, but another admin can actually run the jobs or just manage the web users. You can also define an admin as an auditor, so their only capability is to review the audit logs. Plus, these admin users can be authenticated against AD or LDAP, and we do support dual factor authentication as well. Maybe you want to use a token or some sort of key to authenticate in addition to the user profile and password.

DMZ Secure Gateway

If you're accepting inbound connections from customers, trading partners, maybe even remote employees, you can set up what's called our GoAnywhere Gateway. You can install GoAnywhere Gateway software on a DMZ server, typically a Windows or a Linux box that will act as a two-way proxy, supporting both forward and reverse. It can also act as a load balancer. When you have connections coming in, users might think they're actually coming directly to you to your server, but they are actually being routed through that gateway. Maybe using the secure FTP protocol connecting to Port 22 on your gateway.

The protocols and port numbers are configurable to you on what is being used by them. The Gateway is then going to take that traffic and going to proxy it using that propriety control channel through GoAnywhere. So again, it's all being managed by GoAnywhere. Now, it's going to load balance those connections so if you're going to get a second connection coming in, it will then round robin those over to production system two. And the Gateway is going to be smart enough that if one of your system was to fail, let's say this one goes down, it knows that number one here is still able to work with that.

A couple quick points on the screen is that some of the benefits of this configuration, no inbound ports are needed, so your firewall will stay intact. Keep that solid, keep that closed up there. And again, I mentioned earlier but no files, no security connections need to be stored in the DMZ server. Those are just a couple key areas. With this setup, it will help keep those auditors happy, and it'll keep you protected. So again, this is a great way to help keep everything secure, it'll help you comply to the stricter security policies, HIPAA, Sarbanes–Oxley, SOX, ISO, GDPR, and so on.

HelpSystems IT Operations Platform – Insite

Ash: Nice one, Heath. Thank you. While Heath gets ready for the live demo, I'd just like to introduce HelpSystems Insite. For those of you that don't know anything about this, this is a free web based tool and I'm going to show you what it looks like and what it does. If I can move my screen on. Here we go. So, we talk about it where it brings IT together. It allows you to tie together, to glue together the many and increasing number of HelpSystems solutions.

What you see on the left here in these boxes, these are HelpSystems products, so you can deploy, license these products. You can also trial these products from within these boxes as well. You can also build dashboards. On the right-hand side of the screen here is a sample dashboard. And obviously the more HelpSystems products you have, the more valuable Insite becomes. It's a modern tool, and we have 700 or 800 customers using this now, so it's incredibly powerful.

And here's just a screenshot as to what GoAnywhere can look like within Insite. This is a dashboard and these are some of the metrics that you can display on this dashboard. Totally up to you the order you have them in, the format you have them in, all customizable and incredibly powerful. Again, it allows you to see what's going on within Insite, as well as being able to deploy, and license all from a single place. Heath, over to you.

Heath: Yeah, that looks really good. I like that. And also to add to that with the graphics and all, GoAnywhere Mobile app allows the users to work with GoDrive and Secure Mail features. With GoDrive, the users can preview and download personal or share files from your GoDrive account to your iPhone or iPad, and also from your mobile Android devices. It works like a Dropbox, but it's all secure. It's a lot more secure. We have tracking with it, it's a file collaboration option. You can also use Secure Mail, allowing users to easily email out a link to a recipient to download those documents securely, so it's another great option there.

Commands and APIs

Just a handful more slides just to run through before I dive into the live demonstration that Ash was letting you know about here. I can't wait to show you guys what we can do. But I mentioned earlier some of these key points, but I want to point out there is some really great help. We want to help you guys out there. We have some good slides to help you around that. But just the functionality, GoAnywhere allows you to download and install our commands and APIs. I teased here earlier, this gives you more control. You can run our projects, these workflows from your own command line, and even from your own enterprise scheduler.

Running a Projects from the Command Line

This is just a quick little example of a CL program, so another way you can help automate it from the IBM I, the green screen there. You go should run those projects. It includes message handling, et cetera. You also can run workflows from a Windows or from a Linux box, so a couple of additional examples for you. Our installation requirements are simple and really don't require too much. Here's a quick little screenshot of the IBM i and also the UNIX environment, and what we require. You can see it's very minimal.

SaaS Solution for MFT – MFTaaS

Here we have Linux and Windows, or you could install Goanywhere on a VM server, AWS, Microsoft Azure. Now besides being pretty much OS agnostic, we also have the option now as I hinted earlier, to actually deploy GoAnywhere as GoAnywhere MFT as a Service (MFTaaS), where HelpSystems will manage the hardware and software for you. If that's something you guys are leaning towards and you want to find more information about it, please reach out to us. We'll be glad to talk more and show you more about what we can do it. You can see a few good points there again. It's all about making things easier for you guys if needed.

Ash: I think you're right Heath. It's all about options really, isn't it? Whatever's right for your business.

Live Demo

Heath: Absolutely, because everyone's a little different, different requirements and so forth. I'm going to make sure I'm all good to go here, nothing's timed out on me. Oh that one did, but we'll get back to that one. There are some time outs I have set up. Just to walk through here, I'm going to go through a demonstration and hopefully I'll paint a little story of file processes that you guys can do, and maybe it'll relate to what you guys need to do.

What you're looking at right now is, I'm logged into GoAnywhere as an administrator, so as an admin. So, someone who's been managing GoAnywhere, managing the users, your workflows and so forth. Each one of you guys will have your own customized dashboards. To keep things short and simpler today, I'm going to run through some errors really quickly. If you want to find out more, please let us know, we can do a demo. But, you have a dashboard with some gadgets. It's like a good morning report. You can see what's going on on your server, what has happened recently, et cetera. You have a whole list of different gadgets that you can select from and pick and choose what information is important to you so when you first log in, you can see it. We got some servers that are up and running, there's listeners. We have jobs, users logging in. So again, we can see what's happening. You can drill into job logs, drill into the users, et cetera from here.

And again, we have ways to help you guys out and onboarding processes, but I'm going to jump into resources right now. These resources is really the area where you're going to define those servers that you want to connect to. Servers or locations where you want to push or pull files, pull documents from, or monitor for documents, et cetera. You can define these resources and it'll make your life a lot easier. You don't have to write scripts and manage those scripts for all your connections as I mentioned earlier.

You can see we have quite a range here of different server types, S3 buckets. You can create as many S3 buckets locations, where you want to grab or push files to and from. End users when they log in, they upload a file to a particular alias folder name. Underneath the covers, they could be actually going to an S3 bucket, but they don't know it to push or pull files. If you have different trading partners who run AS2, three and four, we do support those, Azure Blob storage. You can create those different locations as resources.

Cloud Connectors, we have all the different Cloud Connectors that integrate within the workflows. I have a few just listed here. I had mentioned earlier in the PowerPoint, we have a lot, I think what? 38 different Cloud Connectors out there. Azure, SharePoint, Webdox. We have Automate, we got JAMS, we got OneDrive, there's a lot of different ones out there.

Database servers. What's nice in this area, you create those database servers as a resource so if you want to connect to the databases to perform those SQLs, a select, an insert, an update, run a store procedures or read your database tables, it's really easy. Come on here to find them as a connection. Let me grab one of them. We have some built-in drivers you can select, you can also use your own, so you're just come to define that connection. Once you have it defined, you can test out that connection, and blue is good. So at this point, I'm able to connect to that database just like that.

Jumping down the list here, I'll just grab a few here and there, IBM i servers. So again, define those different partitions, different systems that you want to connect to as a resource. You can define that connection, either IP address, host name, profile password, test out that connection. Again, blue is good. Going down, maybe has some ICAP servers. Maybe you want to pass some documents through some type of a scan for any viruses or DLP to make sure it doesn't have any PCI or PII information, we can do that.

Network shares, they're very common to define your local area as a network share, connect up to those shares to push, pull files, monitor those documents, et cetera. Let me jump into one really quickly. This is a native one. Define that path and again, test it out and so forth. We also do support both REST and SOAP servers, so we can do post and pull information there very commonly, are set up your SSH servers through a Secure FTP type of a connection. Same thing here guys. The resources, we're giving you one place to maintain these connections, to find what's required to connect up. You define it, you test it, you make sure it's good. Once you know it's good there, you can also do some additional things around it. Maybe you want to define some automatic recovery options. So, let's say I have 80% of the file transferred, the line goes down so we got a timeout of 15 seconds. I can retry to connect up seven times, waiting five seconds between each attempt and if this job is able to reconnect up, it'll pick up where it left off in the file transfer.

Proxy types. If certain proxy want to go through algorithms, different authentication methods, signatures, et cetera, contacts, we want you to be able to centralize and use one product for everything. So if you can't connect to a server, maybe it's your own server, maybe it's a trading partner's server, who can you call if you can't connect? It's all right there for you, really easy to find. That is really step one in the sense of your file movements. Set up those different servers you want to connect to as a resource.

Step two is about defining that workflow as a project. Where do you want to start? What do you want to do? The pushing, the pulling et cetera. I'm going to actually create one from scratch. But, right away you know, this folder structure, you build your own folder structure. You can create a folder easily enough, just doing a right click, add it. Create one for a department, a region, a location, whatever makes sense for you guys to manage the workflows, these projects. Right now I got the folder like this one. Either way, you come in here, select the folder that you want to work with, pretty easy to get into it. And at that point when you select it, you'll see the list of projects and you can create a brand new project.

You can utilize one of our templates. Maybe we have a template in here that does exactly what you want to do to save you some time, or to learn from it what might be required and so forth. There's a lot. Copy files, database to CSV, database to Excel, to PGP, to email. I'm going to scroll pretty fast. Delete files, run some native commands and programs and so forth on the IBM I. Easy enough to incorporate into workflows. Merge, files, move, et cetera. So, there's a lot of really good templates in here. Let me just scroll back to the top.

I'll get a nice example here just to copy. Give it a good name. Not what I'm going to do here, but example, copy file, whatever. But, give it a good project name and description so you know exactly what you're doing, what service you're connecting with or what this process is all about. Click on Save. This will bring you into design phase. So now at this point, you have four panes to work with. Really quickly, we love variables. Variables give you a lot more power, a lot more flexibility. We have some system variables that you can use. Eventually you can create your own variables and share them, projects. The attributes, the values of your parameters that are laid out here in the outline.

This is that outline that came from that script. If there's something in here that you don't need, enough to right click and delete it, just like that. Let me get rid of that as well. Now I have the task that I want to do. The left-hand side, that component section here, this library is a list of all the different functions, different actions. What is it that you want to do? If you do have those Cloud Connectors, you can use those real easily in your workflows. Compression to be able to zip and unzip the data files. Database performs SQL queries. Data translation, the reading and writing. Reading the data, write it out in the format that you need to, maybe modify some the data. Emailing out. Email out the logs, the files, or the encrypted file.

Your file system refers to your local file system actions, the copy, delete, rename, et cetera where if I expand the file transfer, it breaks it down by the protocol type. So, it's really easy to come in here. Right now I got a copy in there, but maybe you want to eventually throw it in a Secure FTP type of a transfer. Once I copy it, maybe I want to do a PUT, just simply drag and drop, or double left click to add it into your workflow just like that. Your job controls some logic, if then, else's, do some different things in here. You can really customize the workflow, what has been performed, looping options in there, MQ, PGP, encrypt, decrypt, et cetera. So again, there's a lot you can do.

Jumping back here really quickly, I want to walk you through this project just to show you how simple this is to copy a file. There are multiple ways to get the document into it, maybe from a scheduled job, a monitor, et cetera, but I'm just going to keep it short and simple right now and I'm going to browse to a local location. Let me just grab a document. I can grab it from one of my local folders, but I can also grab it from a resource. That step number one we did, we defined it as a resource, maybe I want to grab that local copy or the file I want to grab is from a network share, a remote server, Amazon S3 bucket. They're right there for you to select.

But either way, select that document. The destination, I'm going to actually do it to a directory and I will, I'll push it to a remote server. Those remote resources are listed right there for me. I can select that. In fact, I can drill into it by clicking on the name. It'll actually connect me to that remote server through that resource, so through those permissions that you have to defined on that resource list in what you have permission to see and navigate to. So, you can see I can easily navigate among another IBM i. I can go to home directory, I can go to my folder and I could actually just stop right there. There's my inbound, select it, there it is.

Grab the document, send it there. If it exists, you have options to rename it, override it, et cetera, up to you guys. Plus, normally we actually recommend having some error handling built into it. That's easy enough to do and I think I have an example to show you later on so we'll get back to that later, but let's validate it. At a high level, does it compile? Yes, blue is good. Execute it, run it. So again, it's going to go grab that file, take that file, send it to my remote server, my own remote server or a trading partner’s server, just like that. Blue is good. I am done, and now we also have it auditing. All that detailed information is being captured and written out for you. One file copied successfully, and exactly where it was copied to.

All right, that cool. All right, now what I want to do is get a little more in-depth here just because of time-wise. I want to show you something that I think is pretty cool and what we can do. In order to work my way into that next thing though, I want to talk really quickly about automation because I'm going to use some of that for you in my demonstration here coming up. Once you create those projects, we do have first of all a built-in scheduler. We can help you automate those file transfers; the pushing and the pulling, grab a document, encrypt it, rename it, send it out, whatever it is. And within our scheduler, we do have the ability to create or define holiday calendars. So if you schedule this job let's say to run on Monday, if it's a holiday, what do you want to do? Skip it? Run it? Run it the next business day or the previous business day? Up to you guys.

The other option of automation is monitors, where we can monitor a specific folder for a document or documents that are there, to pick them up and then automatically do something with them. I have one right now that's active that I'll be utilizing here in just a little bit. But what they are, you first of all navigate to where that folder is. Is it local or is it remote through like a Secure FTP resource? You define that first, that first for that location, and then you browse to it by clicking those three dots. Here we are monitoring this MonFolder_IFS, and we're looking for files that are created or modified since I've started it.

And in fact, I do have ... Let me bring that up. Let me see if I can go find it. It's right there. This is the folder that I'm monitoring. When I started it, these two documents are out there, but I'm only looking for daily. But since I started it, this daily one here does not get picked up, it's already there. So what happens is the next time I check, has anything been created or modified? So I'm looking for new documents, something changed, not what was there when I started it. Yes, you could do that. There is an option around file exist, but you can also say anything deleted, modified or created again, since the last time you checked.

The scheduling. How often do you want to monitor that folder? You can define a time period, and then how often within that time period. Here I have every 30 seconds. You can do every minute, every five minutes, every hour, up to you guys. If there are a document, or several documents that are in that particular folder that you're monitoring, we can pick them up, pass them through a file list variable. This example, let the variables called files, plurals, so remember that. I'll use that reference here in just a little bit. So, files will be passed to this project, and this project will do something with those documents automatically. Again, it's up to you guys, your vision there and what you need to do with documents. I'll show you what I'm doing here in just a little bit.

Advanced. We want to make sure there's no locks in those files, and we want to make sure they're complete before we grab them. Email notification, we want you to be informed. If there's a problem, we want you to know about it. If this monitor fails to run, maybe because that folder doesn't exist. It's been renamed or deleted, or maybe you can't get to that remote server that you're trying to monitor, we want you to be informed as well. So again, this one here is looking for that folder and it's picking it up. Let me just change things around just a little bit. So there's again, that's the folder we're monitoring.

I am going to dabble across a few different products here just tot ease you guys a little bit on what we can do. You may have your own automation tool. This is called Robot Schedule. Robot Schedule I have set up right now to actually run a command, that command API, so we have that run project command. I'm going to run that project, a project, a workflow that's already been defined earlier. That project is going to go through a few things for me and do a few things, and I'll show you in just a little bit.

Let me kick this one off. Again, there's ways to automate this as well. I'm just going to do it right now, override everything, just run it. As that's running, if I jumped down to this one and refresh that. All right, that's running. If I refresh it, there we go. Now we have a new file out here. We have a new document that's been created. So now let me jump back into GoAnywhere, then let me walk you through what's just happened. Let's go into projects. All right, we're there. This is the one that I just ran via that scheduler. It's going to read an Excel document, so we're going to read an Excel document. You can read a CSV, you can read a flat file, et cetera.

Then I'm going to take those columns from the Excel document and modify them. Just really quickly I'm just going in there, grab column number one, just leave it as is. This one here is consolidating two columns together, two and three, adding it together, created just one single column, et cetera. So, I've got four columns that I've got now in this modified row set of those four columns. I'm keeping track of that data through a variable called transfer data. So, this is the data I just built and I want to transfer to something. I'm going to jump down. We do have a little clear. By the way, this is just a quick command. I should show it I guess.

I am running a quick clear file on the IBM I, and then I'm going to connect to a database server. You see, I selected there from my resources defined earlier, and I'm going to do an SQL insert. So I'm going to insert those records from this modified row set in that variable created, it was called transfer data. So, I'm using that row set, that variable and pushing all those records into a table just like that. So, that's done. I'm also doing something totally different here just to show you that in this project, you can do whatever you want.

I'm going to another IBM i server, and this time I am running a command, a SQL command. This is one of our BI solutions here at HelpSystems. There's also Showcase, you may have heard. I'm running a view, taking the results, creating a PC document, an Excel document and putting it into this monitor folder that you saw that document, right? You saw that folder, excuse me, that document in that folder I showed you earlier. Now what's going to happen is that document, it lands there and if I show it to you really quickly ... Let me refresh it. Again, there's three files there, back to two.

So, what has happened? That monitor sees that document there, the monitor then fires off another project. This time, it is firing off ... Let me think of where I put it. I think it's in this one, yeah. This one here is going to grab that file, or doc, or files, again plural. There's that variable called files. I'm pointing it out to you in the monitor. It's going to grab all those documents that meet that criteria. It's going to encrypt them with this particular key which is available from a selection there, which is actually being managed in our KMS. So, encrypt all of those files and deliver them to that location right here, and it's going to remote server just like that, automatically.

Next up, as you saw it was gone. I did a delete of the original files so if everything goes successfully there, that gets deleted. I also get a confirmation email indicating what files were actually encrypted and delivered as a confirmation. Here I have error handling built into it. As I mentioned, if something goes wrong, I want to be notified or do something different. Here is quickly enough and powerful enough to send out an email. Hey, project failed, see the attached job log for details. So we have the job log just like that as well.

All right, well you saw the file gone. We everything got transferred successfully. Let me show you really quickly if I jump over to audit logs, and you can break it down in different ways. I'm just going to jump right down to the completed jobs on top. Here is that very first one here, the CSV read. If you look to the far right, that's the API run project. That came from that scheduler, from Robot Scheduler. It kicked off this project. The one above it was fired up because that monitor we have right there. Quick link right to the job log by clicking on it, real easy. There's that information for you.

Regarding reports and all that, I know in the IBM i world when I work with a lot of reps out there, they're always questioning and asking questions about the audit logs, how long you can retain them so you can define how long to keep these logs around before they get archived. Plus, you have the option to push the information to a Syslog Server if needed. There's also SLAs. You can define your SLAs. So if you want to make sure that a particular project, a monitor, or a trigger fires X number of times throughout the day and that it does or does not meet that criteria, you want to be notified., so we can help you with that as well.

Simply come into it, define the particular project that you want to watch over, how many times you expect it to run, the day of the week, the action to take. What do you want to do? Do you want to call a project, a workflow, or send an email out if the condition's met or not met, up to you guys. Really nice feature there. It was just added in the middle last year, third or fourth quarter last year. Again, a really, really nice option there.

So, what do we do next here? That's the advanced workflows. I'm going to switch hats here for the next five minutes or so and talk about the web client, your end users or internal employees on what they need to do to get some files around. Because of time here, I don't have too much time left here but just so you know, within this area you can manage those listeners, the IP addresses as you guys need to. You start them up, you manage them. This is how the users can come in. Again, they could be coming through your gateway. Then it's all about the users and how you set them up, what they can see, what they can do, et cetera.

And because of time, what I'm going to do is just jump right into it. This by the way, I'm going to utilize through our HTTPS server, so maybe you have Secure Mail, or secure folder options, secure forms, the users can log into a page that you can customize. I want to do it right. You can customize it there and when they come in, they can only see the features you have enabled for them. And by the way that customization, you can change the logo, the image, all that fun stuff there. But really quickly, these users, again, if you want them to be able to share files, we have that secure folders through HTTPS. These are virtual folders. They're just pointers, but this is all they're going to see.

So if they click on one such as inbound folders, this could be going to an S3 bucket. This could be going to an encrypted folder. This could be going to just a remote server or local folder, whatever it might be, but the user doesn't know about it. You have to also define their permissions on this folder and what they can do. They can maybe drag and drop to download it, they can also select it to download it, delete it, always based on their permissions and what they can do, nothing else. But they can also maybe upload, and edit it also. Just simply drag and drop, upload the file. You see it being uploaded on below. They'll get a quick confirmation back if it was successful or not. There's even ability to look at the details. There's a warning because it was renamed, but it was successful, but you can also upload it this way, really easy.

GoDrive, that file collaboration tool, the replacement for Box or Dropbox right there. Oops, let me minimize that. Secure Mail to be able to email out securely. It's really easy. You can do it from here, you can also do it from Outlook. So if you have Outlook, we do have plugins there. Here, actually I did a request. Let me do a quick compose first, send this out, show you a quick example. Test. Let me grab a document, throw that in there. Do you want that targeted recipient to be a registered user for another layer security? How many days before this email package expires? Simply click on send, and you can also define how many times they can download it.

Allow a reply, include a password inside this package or also the package so that actually you can have a password required open it up. Click on Send, and that's been sent out. This request file, it's a cool option. If you're working with a customer or a trading partner and they want to send you something securely but they don't have the means and they want to do it now. They don't want to set up, they don't want to register, they just want to send you something very securely. You could through Secure Mail, send them a request file. So again, you would type in their email address, maybe put a lot of text in there, you know, send docs, whatever. Do you want them to register?

Again, if they want to just quickly do it, they may not want to be registered, but you can force it to expire after so many days, then send hit send. So then, they will get an email. And I did get the email, so let me show you that. Whoops, that was something else. Earlier when I grabbed the wrong one there, that was the file that I encrypted and send out via that process earlier when I grabbed the wrong one. Here's the first one. And this is just using our template default for the email so you can customize it, but there's a document. Click on the download. You'll see how many times I can download it. I had set it to one. Once they download it, now it's down to zero. Easy enough, right?

The file request email to be able to have the user upload a file to your server directly. And by the way, I don't think I mentioned this, there's no size restriction unless you define one. Upload a file. They would then attach their documents to it just like that. They could add a message, hit send. This will come back into your account. You will also get an email, just a standard email letting you know that, "Hey, you have some documents out there." So when you come back into it, you can actually go out there and actually then grab them and download them very easily. So if I come over here, refresh it, there's that email and there are those two documents.

And by the way, the third piece of automation is triggers. You can actually set up a trigger so you can automatically be notified that if a file was uploaded, et cetera. These triggers, they're going to fire instantly. They could actually move a file, they could rename a file, they could call a project, but it's all instant from a triggered event. Here's an email that I just received because I uploaded that file and the file I uploaded when I was showing you the secure folders. Very easy to get informed of what's happening around your file movements.

The last thing I want to do is just come to jump back in here, show you the audit logs, and we'll jump back in the PowerPoint. Just to save. That was an HTTPS transfer. If I click on that particular service log area, you can see the email read package. If I go down a little bit, you have all the actions, everything that I just did out there really quickly. The uploads, when I logged in, if I downloaded something, if there's anything that went wrong. It's all there for you, again, easy enough to print out, et cetera. All right, I know we're getting close on time so let me go ahead and jump back into our PowerPoint to wrap things up. I think Ash has the next slide here.

Q&A

Ash: Yeah, that's brilliant Heath. I love the fact you can define resources once and then use them many times. That's really powerful. And also just seeing just what you show there in 25 minutes, it's much more than a file transfer solution, especially when working alongside other products, whether they're HelpSystems products or other third party products. Really powerful, thank you. So, one last thing before we jump into some Q&A. We've got a few minutes left.

Please reach out to us using the links above if you have any questions, or you'd like to set up a demo or a trial. You're fully entitled to a 30-day, fully functional trial to move your files around and it usually takes less than 10 minutes to download, install and get GoAnywhere up and running. Plus during that trial, you'll have access to both our documentation and our fantastic support staff. So, let's have a little look and see if we have any questions. We have a couple Heath if you've got your breath back now from that fantastic demo.

Heath: Exactly.

Ash: Training or professional services, is that something we offer?

Heath: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do see that out there, absolutely. GoAnywhere users can get expert help from our product specialists in the following areas. We have training, we have consulting, integration, configuration, upgrades, conversions, et cetera online, or we can even come to you. One thing I didn't have time to show you too within GoAnywhere, there were some question marks in the screens. I usually show that, but we have actually outstanding built-in help.

In fact, I'm going to quickly show it because I think it's very powerful where if I jump into a project, a workflow guys and ... Let me just pick on ... What server am I on here? Let's see here. Yeah, let me just go into one. It's interesting what I'm seeing there. Oh, I'm on different servers. I was like, "Where am I at?" You can have GoAnywhere installed on a lot of different platforms as I mentioned. I have it all over the place. I apologize for that one there.

But what I want to show you, you see those question marks in top right corner, the ones listed right there. If I Get into the Secure FTP task, there's one right there and when I click on it, it actually brings up some detailed information very quickly. It's intuitive, it knows where I'm at and better yet, besides the nice, awesome information there, usually it'll find some really good examples to help you out. So, it's really great. Great question.

Ash: Yeah, that online help definitely helped me when I was learning the product. We’ve got another question here. Does GoAnywhere have the ability to protect data at rest, and what does it take to encrypt those files?

Heath: Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I teased a little bit about earlier but what it is, through a wizard, we can walk you through a few steps to set up a folder to be encrypted. Any files that are transferred into this folder using GoAnywhere, maybe through a workflow, through a user uploading a file through GoAnywhere will automatically, very seamlessly be encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption. So, it's that simple to set that up.

Ash: Fantastic, fantastic. And we've got another ... I think I mentioned it was about 10 minutes to set up but if somebody was going to do a trial, what's involved? What do they need to have ready Heath?

Heath: Yeah, no, that's great because I teased you guys about our new interface out there, so let me actually do this for you. You can actually work with us. We'd love to give you a demo and learn a little more what your requirements are. Then when you're ready for that demonstration or if you want to give it a trial run, we do offer a 30-day trial. You can actually install GoAnywhere on-premises on your own VM server. We also offer a cloud option as well to trial it, to install it, to run it so we have some really good options out there for you.

I know we're hitting the top of the hour. I do see one question too about the presentations, the slides. Absolutely, these can be sent out as well, and I believe Angela can help us out with that one there. Make sure you get a copy of that or we can take care of it. I don't know, I don't know. But we will make sure you get it, no problem.

Ash: That's fantastic Heath. We've hit the top of the hour. I think we've run out of time today. Thank you for your fantastic overview and your detailed demo, and thank you for all the attendees for taking an hour out of their busy days to join us today. Thank you very much.

Heath: Yup. Thanks again everyone. Have a great day.

Ash: Bye-bye.