Increasing your MFT operational efficiency

Many organizations that we speak to are in the process of modernizing their way of working. They are looking to reduce costs, improve operational efficiency and business agility.

This includes Managed File Transfer (MFT) customers, who require a scalable, reliable, and secure solution for all of their file transfer needs, and want to innovate, offer new services, and improve their interactions with their customers.

Axway has recently released Amplify Flow Manager. This provides several exciting additional benefits for our MFT customers and allows them to address these challenges.

In this blog, we will explore some of these benefits and explain how they address the issues and initiatives that companies are facing as they strive to modernize and innovate.

Aspects of Flow Manager

Some of the aspects of Flow Manager we will look at are:

• Self-service capabilities to increase operational efficiency.
• Complete deployment choice, on-premises, Cloud, or hybrid.
• Central control and governance.
• Ease of use with a single UI for the whole MFT ecosystem.

Self-service capabilities to increase operational efficiency

A key benefit of Flow Manager is that it provides self-service capabilities to both IT and business users, allowing organizations to increase significantly their operational efficiency and reduce their time to revenue.

These self-service capabilities are provided by allowing IT to create reusable templates, which can then be used by business users to create and deploy new flows.

The use of reusable templates provides a number of advantages:

1. It frees up IT resources from having to respond constantly to demands from business users.
2. It allows new flows to be created and deployed in a matter of minutes, reducing the time and effort required by up to 90%.

This use of templates has several other benefits for the organization. It ensures flows are standardized, making them easier to report on and update, and it allows IT to remain fully in control of the flows by being able to specify the configuration and security settings to be used.

Business users benefit from an easy-to-use solution for creating their flows, making their lives easier, and reducing the risk of shadow IT as they seek a solution to meet their needs.

Complete deployment choice, on-premises, Cloud, or hybrid

Axway MFT customers have a complete deployment choice for their MFT components: on-premises, in a private Cloud, in the Axway Managed Cloud, or any combination of the above.

Flow Manager can be used with all of these MFT deployment models and can itself either be deployed on-premises as a customer-managed component or is available as-a-service in the Cloud.

Customers with a significant existing MFT implementation can keep their current architecture and benefit from the advantages of Flow Manager.

Additionally, customers moving to the Cloud can use Flow Manager as a first step, allowing them to move the underlying components to the Cloud at their own pace.

Central control and governance

Besides providing comprehensive self-service capabilities, Flow Manager provides an easy-to-use management interface, providing centralized control and governance capabilities for MFT.

Flow Manager includes plugins for both Transfer CFT and SecureTransport, allowing the control, configuration, and management of these components from a single location.

Flow Manager also provides mass-update capabilities, ensuring organizations with a large MFT deployment can easily remain up to date.

Organizations wanting to integrate Flow Manager capabilities into other third-party applications can do so by using the full, centralized APIs available with the solution.

Ease of use with a single UI for the whole MFT ecosystem

Lastly, Flow Manager will provide a single, easy-to-use user interface for the customers’ entire MFT ecosystem.

All populations of users, be they IT or business, have a single UI for all services, irrespective of the underlying architecture, and irrespective of the underlying MFT products.

Flow Manager can be used by customers at all stages of their transformation and modernization journey.

New customers will benefit immediately from the self-service capabilities and centralized administration, whether they are looking for on-premises or a Cloud MFT solution. Existing MFT or legacy product customers can transition their existing flows into Flow Manager and rapidly benefit from the advantages it provides.

Summary

Flow Manager and the rest of the MFT components provide key benefits for organizations requiring a secure, reliable, and scalable corporate solution for all their file exchange needs.

The template-driven self-service capabilities for business and IT, central control of the complete MFT ecosystem, and deployment choice of all make Flow Manager a key consideration for companies looking to reduce costs and increase operational efficiency and agility.