MFT and AI: why secure data movement is critical for AI success

With the ever-increasing discussion about AI, the challenges many enterprises face in harnessing its potential are becoming more apparent. Chief Product Officer Vince Padua recently discussed how Axway is helping enterprises make their data AI-ready, highlighting some of these points in his post.

He emphasizes how Axway empowers enterprises to overcome data silos and fragmented business processes, ensuring data is AI-ready—accessible, secure, and governed.

Axway Managed File Transfer supports data integration, scalability, and compliance, giving businesses the tools to prepare for AI-driven initiatives by enabling seamless data flow and governance.

Data is key to unlocking AI for greater business agility

Data is the Most Valued Part of the equation across the spectrum of tangible business value, all the way downstream to AI/MLOps and data management.

On a business level, there are several important considerations:

Data enables personalization

In enterprise contexts, AI thrives on the ability to tailor solutions to specific users, markets, or operational needs. For example:

• Customer insights: AI can use customer data to provide personalized recommendations.
• Supply chain optimization: Data allows AI to predict demand and streamline operations.
• Employee productivity: Insights derived from enterprise data can enhance workflows.

The data-driven advantage

Data is a unique asset because it is proprietary and not easily replicable.

Enterprises that collect, manage, and analyze their data effectively can derive actionable insights that set them apart from competitors. And data-backed decision-making allows businesses to respond faster to market changes.

Data monetization opportunities

For many enterprises, data is not just a resource—it’s an asset that can be monetized. Organizations can:

• Sell anonymized data insights to other businesses.
• Develop data-driven services powered by AI.
• Use data to create value-added products (e.g., predictive maintenance tools).

Operational benefits across the enterprise

The same way, data strategy benefits IT by unifying increasingly fragmented business processes.

Data can surface new insights with AI

AI transforms raw data into actionable insights that impact various aspects of a business.

Operations: AI analyzes operational data to identify inefficiencies and suggest improvements.

Customer experience: Customer feedback and behavior data guide better engagement strategies.

Financial health: Financial data enables forecasting and fraud detection.

Data powers AI innovation

The richness of data often dictates the scope of innovation an AI system can achieve. Some examples include:

• Training new AI models: Novel datasets can lead to breakthroughs in AI capabilities.
• Creating new services: Enterprises can monetize insights or develop data-driven services.
• Improving existing systems: Continuous inflow of data helps refine AI models over time.

Data enables real-time decision making

Modern enterprises often rely on AI to make split-second decisions, such as fraud detection, inventory management, or customer support. This requires:

• Real-time data streams: Feeding up-to-the-minute data into AI systems ensures timely responses.
• Data integrity: Reliable data ensures that real-time decisions are correct and actionable.

Data quality is key to de-siloing data ecosystems

AI models, especially machine learning and deep learning systems, are built and refined using data. The training process involves:

• Learning patterns: Data provides the input for algorithms to identify correlations and trends.
• Improving accuracy: Models iteratively improve as they are exposed to more data.
• Generalizing predictions: Diverse datasets enable AI to perform well across varying scenarios.

Ensuring AI reliability

Data ensures that AI systems remain robust and reliable. High-quality data enables:

• Accuracy: Better data leads to more accurate predictions.
• Bias reduction: Balanced datasets prevent AI from perpetuating stereotypes or unfair outcomes.
• Scalability: Properly managed data ensures AI can handle growth in use cases or datasets.

Compliance and risk management

Enterprises face significant risks if data is not handled properly. AI initiatives built on well-managed data:

• Reduce compliance risks (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA).
• Ensure transparency and accountability in AI operations.
• Minimize the likelihood of incorrect or unethical AI decisions.

AI without data is just a concept. AI systems are fundamentally tools designed to interpret and act upon data. Without data:

• AI cannot function or generate value.
• Decision-making relies on guesswork rather than empirical analysis.
• AI becomes a theoretical rather than practical asset.

So, given these variables, where does file transfer software come in in all of this?

MFT plays a crucial role in enabling enterprises to leverage AI

The data value chain above can provide some clear insights, and we can look at in two parts:

• MFT as an enabler, and
• MFT as provider

MFT helps to effectively counteract the siloed data (MFT as the provider) and also conquer fragmented business processes (MFT as an enabler).

As an enabler, MFT solutions such as those provided by Axway have been moving data at scale securely and reliably for decades, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel.

MFT plays a crucial role in compliance and risk management, ensuring enterprises can meet the ever-evolving need of the global economy and ecosystem, whether it is GDPR, HIPPA, PCI DSS etc .

One U.S. financial services provider we work with operates in a highly regulated industry, which means they need to meet rigorous requirements around information security and data governance.

“With SecureTransport, we get end-to-end control and visibility of our data — with full encryption at every stage of the transfer process,” says a spokesperson.

“During compliance audits, our SFTP processes are always under the microscope. The Axway solution gives us peace of mind that we are following industry best practices for MFT and keeping our sensitive data secure.”

Read the full case study

MFT is at the forefront of moving data safely and securely, helping enterprises protect their valued competitive advantage and ensuring data integrity.

MFT is a data flow controller, ensuring secure routing of data to and from system with proper policy enforcement in a repeatable, reusable fashion.

MFT plays well with the ecosystem needs to connect business processes such as onboarding/offboarding during the partner lifecycle. It provides comprehensive developer tools such as APIs to communicate in an open format with any upstream/downstream process during integration.

As a provider, MFT solutions must consistently evolve to keep up with needs of enterprises and will continue to see evolution to meet this need to help enable data for AI initiatives.

Especially when the data producers and consumers need translation of protocols or services to connect the ecosystem:

• MFT becomes the centralized data movement hub to connect the dots between batch data, and ETL processes, and connecting to the cloud services like buckets, blob stores, etc.
• MFT provides the composable model for data flows that can be automated to feed the batch processes and real-time data integration.
• MFT is tested at moving large data sets across hybrid ecosystems with very demanding SLA’s.

MFT is a data flow controller, ensuring secure routing of data to and from system with proper policy enforcement

A wish list for MFT solutions leveraging AI

Getting down to some practical realities, to really start leveraging AI in your enterprise, your file transfer solution should include the following capabilities:

Reliability and security: MFT solutions can harness AI to become more reliable and effective, moving from enabling automation to engaging autonomously to the needs of the system and flow.

• Self-healing systems and flows
• Insight-driven workload prioritization
• Security posture drift and remediation
• Configuration drift and remediation
• Predictive monitoring and action
• Sustainability, ensuring only the right data is securely moved for AI initiatives, reducing unnecessary data transfers, optimizing resource utilization.

MFT operations with business-friendly self-service workflows and easier collaboration represent a proactive way we can all work towards more sustainable GenAI.

Operational effectiveness: MFT solutions can leverage AI to drive more effective data integration capabilities.

Onboarding optimization:

• Self service
• Dynamic engagement and lifecycle management
• Flow configuration and recommendation

Documentation and chat assist (think of it as “MFT GPT”):

• Troubleshooting
• Error remediation
• Improved user experience

What’s next? File transfer solution capability evolutions

Looking to the future, there are other possible evolutions to MFT solutions that would help enterprises harness the full power of AI.

For example, think beyond the file-based data models to ensure enterprises can apply the rigor of MFT capabilities to extreme data sets:

• Streaming data exchanges
• Hybrid cloud integration
• Object store handling an integration

AI capabilities could extend monitoring beyond the transfer, by enriching the metadata to feed more data that can be used to train LLM’s that are unique to the enterprise data integration needs.

Finally, solving the autonomous nature of data integration is the next frontier as an industry. Automation can unlock all sorts of operational efficiencies, and autonomous middleware is the future of integration.

Be ready for AI with Axway MFT

In conclusion, AI without data is nothing, but data integrity matters and is a critical element of any AI initiative.

Axway has been on the data governance and integration mission since the 1980s, and its Managed File Transfer (MFT) capabilities have been a core part of many organizations’ efforts to move data securely and reliably across vast data silos, while navigating complex workflows.

Leveraging the tried and tested data integration models that MFT solutions bring will allow enterprises to securely and reliably meet that need – without fully re-inventing all their integration needs.