The value of a modern MFT solution

Many organizations today have embarked on a journey to transform and modernize their file transfer infrastructure. A key driver is to ensure they have a modern platform that will allow them to address their current and future business, security, and governance needs, as well as allow them to innovate and address new use cases.

Having a modern platform provides organizations with several specific benefits:

1. Increased functionality: A modern solution will provide self-service capabilities to both IT and to business users, which will reduce the friction between these populations of users and decrease the time to implement new services. It will also allow the addressing of additional use cases, and providing headless operations, to improve the integration capabilities into third-party applications.
2. Improved security and governance: Organizations with a modern solution have the necessary visibility and control over all aspects of file transfers. This ensures they can meet their security and governance requirements as well as their monitoring and alerting capabilities. These requirements guarantee that issues can be identified and addressed promptly to ensure service level agreements (SLAs) are met.
3. Modern platform and infrastructure: Customers require the support of a large range of modern platforms, protocols, and infrastructure. They need scalability, ease of deployment, and upgrade through the use of a containerized architecture.  Certain organizations are modernizing a step further and looking to use a hosted solution or even a Cloud-based service.

AMPLIFY™ Managed File Transfer provides all the features and capabilities to meet these needs and allows organizations to future-proof their file transfer infrastructure while having the functionality they require today to run their business.

The need to upgrade

A number of our customers currently using legacy solutions, such as XFB Gateway, Transfer InterPel, or Transfer CFT with no governance, are considering their next step in the modernization and transformation journey. 

The current solution, which is often a core part of the business, has served them well over the years can be showing its age. Extending and innovating on top of these solutions can be challenging, cumbersome, complex, and expensive. Transitioning to AMPLIFY Managed File Transfer will allow these customers to take their next step of the journey.

Transition Portal offering

Axway has a lot of experience helping customers transition from older solutions to the latest versions of our software. Over the years, our professional services have assisted customers, assembling scripts, documentation, and expertise to simplify and standardize the task, lowering the risk and time required.

This tool, documentation, and expertise are now available as a productized offering for our customers, for them to use themselves as part of their transition project. The offering is available as a subscription and includes the transition tool, days of enablement for the customer team, as well as a certain amount of remote assistance.

There are many benefits of using the Transition Portal rather than performing a manual migration. Some of these benefits are:

• Reduced time to perform the migration: by using pre-defined templates, the time to transition individual flows can be greatly reduced, which is an important aspect for customers with many existing flows.
• Reduced complexity: with the use of a proven methodology, as well as standardization in the transition process. This will also reduce the risk associated with the transition.
• Axway assistance: the use of the tool is accompanied by specific enablement and assistance, ensuring that questions and issues are addressed on time.

Running a transition project

Managing a transition project can be complex, and several factors need to be considered from a business technical and execution perspective.

From a business perspective, customers need to decide which flows they would like to transition first, and which flows may no longer be required. It is recommended to start with some non-critical flows, to get a better understanding of the tool, and validate the process on the customer’s infrastructure.

From a technical perspective, customers need to have a suitable target architecture in place, including AMPLIFY™ Flow Manager, and either Transfer CFT or SecureTransport. They will also need to have the infrastructure in place for the installation and execution of the Transition Portal.

And finally, from an execution perspective, it’s important to understand that the transition is not a simple one-to-one migration but will require some changes to the flows. The existing flows will need to be assessed, enriched, and converted to a format compatible with AMPLIFY Flow Manager.

In all cases, experience has shown us that the key to a successful transition project is planning. Many of our customers are experienced with this type of project, but for those that need guidance, our professional services organization can provide the necessary assistance.

Migrate on your own terms using the Transition Portal

The transition portal will help with the transition with these steps:

1. Take stock of the existing flows. This provides the customer with a comprehensive list of flows and allows the selection of the priority and order for the transition.
2. By allowing the import of the flows, they are enriched and refined using pre-defined patterns and models and put into a format compatible with the target solution, AMPLIFY Flow Manager.
3. The Transition Portal then performs the migration and creates the flows in AMPLIFY Flow Manager. From there, they can be pushed to either Transfer CFT or SecureTransport for execution.

It’s important to convey that this is not a list of ways that Transition Portal will help but is a list of the different steps that need to be carried out, in this order.

Next steps

Customers running legacy versions of our solutions, such as XFB Gateway Transfer InterPel or Transfer CFT with no governance, and which would like to transform and modernize their file transfer solution with the use of the Transition Portal should reach out to their Axway sales representative.