Handy MFT Tips from bTrade to Help You with Information Governance

Don Miller

A Solution with Monitoring and Scheduling Capability Is a Must

Effective data security is a vital part of delivering value to an organization. To maximize the value of electronic data while also reducing risk, we counsel organizations to take a centralized, global approach to Information governance. We believe that our MFT (Managed File Transfer) software provides a holistic solution for information governance issues because it has the features/functionality to address and resolve the core requirements of the many mandates, whether imposed internally or by external authorities.

Monitoring

In the day-to-day world of MFT, a time will come when you need to know what your system is actually doing. Using TDXchange, our enterprise-class MFT solution, you can accomplish this by using the “Dashboard” feature. The Dashboard gives you visibility of a great amount of information relating to what has been taking place behind the scenes, such as the amount of all inbound and outbound transactions, files being processed by the various system adapters, the number of files processed by each transport protocol you use, etc. The information is displayed in three separate parts—successful, failures and pending.  This gives you the ability to investigate a particular connection or transport if the number of failures is excessive, or even to help diagnose problems.

In addition, TDXchange maintains transaction totals for each participant in the community and the protocols being used. With this information you can see at a glance each trading partner’s activity, along with transaction totals for your own organization. This type of information allows you to have a better grasp over your total system utilization with up-to-date figures available at the click of a mouse. Using the advanced search capabilities, you can focus the information to a particular time period to see how active your system was at that time. This can be very useful in determining if there could be any hardware/protocol constraints during any particular time.

If you use the Mailbox feature, the Dashboard will allow you to look and see what activity is occurring within the individual mailboxes, showing files that have been uploaded, downloaded and not yet retrieved. This, combined with our Ad hoc feature, gives you more specific information about this particular activity as well.

Our Dashboard also monitors the expiration dates of certificates for both you and your trading partners. The Dashboard screen (see below) allows permitted users to browse certificates and display those that will expire in whatever timeframe you specify. This can help to keep the data transfers flowing because you can be proactive and notify those participants whose certificates will soon be expiring.

Scheduling

Every IT professional wants to automate his or her processes, and TDXchange gives you power to do that for your file transfer flows. Each transport protocol provides a Linux cron type of scheduling. Using this allows you to fine-tune the day and times that a particular type of transaction or activity to be processed. This scheduling feature allows you to make very specific time settings from every second, to once a year, and everything in between.

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We have also provided a method to add a maintenance window per trading partner. If some of your partners have identified periods of time when their servers are offline, you can add this to their profile. For example, Partner A is down every Sunday between 3 and 4 a.m. With this window specified, no transactions will be attempted until after the specified timeframe has passed. Once you set this up for the trading partner, you don’t have to worry again because the process is now automated. This can be used for a one-time outage or normally scheduled downtimes. When using this feature, it can reduce the number of false alert messages regarding files having not been delivered/received, or any other type of transport failure.

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Allow bTrade to Help

A well-implemented MFT solution is a necessity for organizations facing stringent information governance mandates, and today that is all organizations. To learn more about bTrade’s MFT solutions, including the monitoring and scheduling capabilities, please contact one of our MFT experts by sending a confidential email to info@btrade.com.