For over a year now, the Axway MFT team have been working on the creation of a new solution, one which pushes an already marketplace leader into the next stage of maturity.
While many file transfer solutions simply exist to move files from source to destination, 2025 and beyond brings with it customer expectations of automation and intelligence, which help to reduce the burden of manual overheads and improve operational efficiency. The impact of the adoption of AI (Artificial Intelligence) means that solutions which require dedicated teams or roles are ever increasingly viewed as archaic.
This solution is Axway Workbench: a centralized governance and control solution which blends solution health visibility, remote command issuance, end-to-end file tracking, and automated or self-service-enabled operational management capabilities. Looking at the wider marketplace of managed file transfer solutions, Workbench is unique, bringing significant differentiation to the Axway MFT portfolio and unparalleled benefits to customers.
In this blog, I will cover four use cases in which Workbench is the ideal solution to help you understand its possible applications.
Prefer to watch a video instead? Discover four use cases for Axway Workbench.
How can I ensure optimal performance across multiple servers?
The problem: Axway MFT customers range from having a handful of MFT servers up to several hundreds. In cases of significant numbers, adequate management of these solutions via their individual administration consoles can be a challenge.
Downtime events are disruptive, but they are easily detected by the disruption in file transfer processes that they cause. The real challenge comes with monitoring for degraded performance. Situations where servers remain online, but perform below optimal levels.
Such situations could be an indicator of a larger impending problem, which could have been headed off if recognized earlier. It could also result in restricted throughput, which may go unnoticed for long periods of time if the impact is small enough.
The solution: Workbench provides a centralized and consolidated view of all Axway MFT servers, both SecureTransport and Transfer CFT, and displays them using a color indicator from green to amber to red. Green represents health; red represents a server that’s completely unresponsive; and an amber color indicates a responsive server with problems.
Each server can be expanded to reveal its system resource usage, daemons/servers enabled and their status, and even in the case of Transfer CFT, the size of the catalog and COM.
Where there are problems, Workbench even allows for the stop, start, and restart of daemons/services directly from the Workbench console. It negates the need to visit individual servers or server interfaces, or provides the Workbench user with access to those servers.
This centralized access control alone has the potential to save a lot of time onboarding and off-boarding MFT admins.
How can I stop the endless trawling through logs to understand file transfer outcomes?
The problem: It’s a classic challenge – you are told a file hasn’t arrived at its expected destination at an expected time. Can you trace the file back through all the solutions it has traversed to understand what has happened to it?
This common headache for MFT and IT administrators requires understanding the end-to-end flow, looking through each of the severs to trace the path the file took. In some cases, servers handling several thousand a day may have sizable log files which are not easily interrogated or are slow to return meaningful results.
The solution: With all Axway MFT servers connected to Workbench, file transfer outcomes are centralized and can be interrogated from a central console. By simply entering the filename into the search bar, the file should be easily identified along with any associated failure events.
Where there have been multiple attempts to transfer the file – such as the use of automated retries in Transfer CFT – each attempt is logged in the transfer history for view.
This saves huge amounts of effort and time which would have been dedicated to tracking files through multiple servers, via multiple administrative interfaces of different solutions.
How do I learn about SLA breaches immediately, so I can respond in a timely manner?
The problem: For most MFT administrators, failed delivery, malformed files, or files not arriving on time are problems which are detected too late to take meaningful action. In many cases, the problem is completely missed until notification by an expectant trading partner, recipient, or upstream/downstream operator.
This can result in disruption to other business processes reliant on those files. In some cases, SLAs are agreed by the business, and breaching them could result in penalties or reputational damage.
Ultimately, re-processing of files, tracking lost files and having to diagnose the issue which led to the problem initially are all efficiency sinkholes which reduce the effectiveness of the MFT solution and slow the attainment of ROI (Return on Investment).
The solution: Most, if not all, MFT solutions on the marketplace today have the ability to create notifications or flags when files arrive in an unexpected format or do not arrive at all. But they all require some customization of workflows or a higher-than-average solution familiarity to achieve.
Workbench has an automated rule feature which allows for notification rules to be built using a visual studio-esque interface. Rules can be built from scratch or MFT administrators can make use of several pre-built rules for a variety of requirements such as late files, incorrect file sizes, and unexpected quantity of files, among many other examples.
Notifications can be delivered via email, Microsoft Teams alerts, or directly into ServiceNow. The result? Not only can SLA breaches be detected immediately, but that the teams tasked with rectifying the problem can be notified via a channel of their choosing and in alignment with their existing work practices.
With thousands of user accounts to manage, how can I automate or self-service some of the management activities?
The problem: Scalability introduces challenges for small teams or teams with existing heavy workloads. Take for example the management of client authentication certificates for FTPS or HTTPS connections into SecureTransport. Each certificate has a validity which, once expired, requires some communication with the owner of the account to minimize disruption to active file transfer processes using that account.
Certificate management is a challenge in any solution for almost every IT team. Extrapolate this problem out to thousands of client certificates, and you have a full-time role which exists just to play whack-a-mole and ensure each certificate is re-provisioned on-time.
This is just one operational challenge among many:
- Password resets
- Monitoring for configuration drift
- Changes in configuration across multiple servers
The solution: In the case of certificate management in particular, Workbench is able to query each of the Axway MFT servers for their certificates, placing their reference in the Workbench console.
A centralized view with warning for expiring certificates is the first helpful step in giving visibility into what, for some teams, is a reoccurring ticking time-bomb.
Workbench leads Axway MFT into the future
Workbench is not just a tool for solving today’s operational challenges — it’s a foundational platform designed to support the future of Axway MFT. In the months and years ahead, Workbench will evolve to incorporate even more advanced capabilities.
As enterprises grow in complexity and the volume of file-based data exchange continues to rise, Workbench stands as the intelligent command center to govern it all. Whether your team is managing 10 servers or 500, a few trading partners or thousands, Workbench brings the control, visibility, and automation needed to make modern MFT truly manageable.
Axway Workbench isn’t just a nice-to-have. For organizations that are serious about operational excellence, it’s essential.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Axway Workbench and what does it do?
Workbench is a new product which provides centralized visibility, observability, and operational control across Axway MFT transfer products: Transfer CFT and SecureTransport. It offers a modern user experience, product health overviews, consolidated file tracking, proactive alerting, and SLA tracking.
Workbench lays the groundwork for AI-assisted insights, helping MFT teams to shorten the gap between problem identification and resolution and simplifying complex file transfer operations.
Axway Workbench will simplify and improve the administration, deployment, and operational support of Transfer CFT and SecureTransport:
- Control across deployment types for transfer products and all environments that run Axway MFT.
- Empower the operational team with a modern user experience with visibility into the MFT ecosystem, including health overviews, end-to-end transfer monitoring, long-term analytics, and alerting.
- AI-driven ‘smart operations’ to optimize transfers, automate issue resolution, enhance decision-making.
- Enabling central management of multiple MFT products, reducing complexity and operational overhead.
- Pre-built capabilities that accelerate time-to-value, moving beyond basic visibility into actionable insights and automated resolutions.
What are the key capabilities of Axway Workbench?
Visibility
- Birds-eye-view in a modern user interface
- Product health status and metrics for Transfer CFT and SecureTransport
- Transfer monitoring tailored to the MFT pattern
- Out-of-the-box dashboards and metrics (Error dashboard, Transfer metrics, Top 10)
- Compliance and security dashboards
Observability
- Transfer monitoring drill-down and correlated troubleshooting
- Preset templates to ease alerting and rules customization (e.g., missing files)
- Multi-channel alerting (email, Teams, ServiceNow)
- User activity reporting (unusual user activity, failed login attempts, locked accounts)
- Detect expiring certificates for partners
Ops Management
- Centralized UI access for products
- Remediation actions: restart/resubmit transfer
- Operations: product start, stop, update
- Configuration drift: detect deviations from baseline requirements
- Granular access per product/BU/partner
Which MFT products are supported by Axway Workbench?
Initially, Workbench supports SecureTransport and Transfer CFT. In the future, additional products may be supported based on changes to the roadmap, prioritization, and customer demand.
Which types of roles would find value in Axway Workbench?
- MFT Admins and Operators
- IT Support Teams
- Business Owners (e.g., LOB leads)
- C-Suite/Compliance Teams