Thank you, our adivisors will calling you.
par ESBD • 15 Dec 2021
Customer industry: Banking & Finance
The “XFB Gateway” solution by Axway was reaching the end of its life. The proposal of the current supplier was to switch to its new solution “Secure Transport”. This situation was the reason for the customer to launch an open consultation, comparing costs and functional possibilities of other solutions that are currently available on the market.
The “XFB Gateway” platform was mainly used to make PeSIT transfers with business partners, both internal and external. Additional pre- and post-processing tasks were performed through shell scripts. This induced constraints due to manual execution of these tasks, potential knowledge drain and the maintenance of these scripts throughout time.
Talking to other users, they learned that migrating Axway XFB to the solution “Secure Transport” was not as transparent or painless as one could have imagined. The financial aspect of this migration has also been an important element in the customer’s decision to initiate an market consultation.
Internet searches allowed the customer to quickly identify the ESBD as an expert in the field of MFT solutions. The PeSIT keyword for the online search was used to create the first selection of potential vendors and service providers to meet their needs. After a first introduction, a date was quickly set for the so-called “discovery” presentation of GoAnywhere MFT. At the end of this presentation, the customer understood that the functional requirements could be met and that the pre-sales technical team from the ESBD had an extensive expertise in the overall MFT domain. As a result of this presentation, the customer selected us to carry out a proof of concept.
As we were able to discuss the technical aspects as well as the plans for the integration and migration, the customer felt confident to take this decision. GoAnywhere MFT’s extensive functional possibilities, scalability and easy-to-use interface convinced the customer’s technical teams. Furthermore, the strong points in the offered solutions were the native integration of audit trail logging and the possibility to greatly simplify the creation of automated file transfer processes. This made it possible to replace the use of custom developed shell scripts and all the related complexity and maintenance challenges.
Furthermore, the very short implementation and migration time was an important advantage, thanks to the methodological and technical experience with “XFB Gateway” migration projects by the BBES Group’s technical team. The consultation started off with two main goals: reducing the software and maintenance cost and significantly gain productivity. Additionally, the continuity of the operational flows had to be guaranteed during the migration, as well as keeping processing functionalities the way they were in the different shell scripts while changing to a more durable and simple solution.
Modernisation projects frequently experience thorny issues when automating tools are being used during a migration. Problems often occur because these scripts have been developed over a longer period and are not documented correctly or no longer exist within the company. In addition, the diversity of these scripts, written by different development teams, hardly respect any guidelines of harmonisation of the source code.
It is therefore important to make a thorough inventory of the different tools used, to be able to translate to a central GoAnywhere MFT environment. In this case, the ESBD’s technical team managed to identify types of flows and standardise them. As a result, it reflected in greater flexibility, simplified the maintenance and automation management while significantly increasing the security and monitoring capabilities.
Most challenging was understanding the complexity of the flows and scripts implemented for process automation, as well as the PeSIT protocol implemented in Axway’s solution since it was not fully respecting the RFC’s. It took all the expertise of ESBD’s consultants to convert back to consistent standardisation and secure flow automation.
It is the full management of file transfers that has been modernised. All processes can now be controlled from within a single, ergonomic and intuitive interface.
The high level of details and traceability that GoAnywhere MFT offers out-of-the-box, contributes to an improvement of the productivity within the IT department.
Data security has been strengthened. Data that was once stored and visible in scripts, is now centralised and encrypted in a database, with rigorous access control. Traceability logs in GoAnywhere MFT ensure an audit trail of all operations at any time.
Segregation of the rights offers the advantage of priviledge access to GoAnywhere MFT, based on levels of responsibility and expertise.
Furthermore, excessive maintenance of scripts has been eliminated in favour of parameterisation via connectors (data end-points) in the Advanced Workflow module. It is now possible to easily perform changes to these end-points, which automatically updates all depending workflows. Therefore, besides increasing efficiency, this reduces the number of required changes and therefore the risk of errors.
The customer is fully satisfied with their choice. From the progress of the project to the quality of the answers which were given by the experts of the ESBD, as well as the agreed timelines between the customer and the ESBD teams (sales, consultants and support).
The trusted relationship that has been established between the customer’s technical teams and technical support from ESBDp, has made it possible to propose areas for continuous improvement. This applies to both the use of the product as well as the improvement of settings through advanced properties in GoAnywhere MFT.
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