The start of every new year brings a fresh opportunity to dust off the crystal ball and share our predictions on the evolving landscape of file transfer. With valuable contributions from leading file transfer specialists, global vendors, and trusted partners - including some familiar faces who contributed to our 2024 predictions - we're here to provide a comprehensive perspective on the trends shaping the future of this technology. So, what can we expect from Managed File Transfer in 2025?
The Growing Demand for Security and File Transfer Expertise
In the last year we have seen a shift in the visibility (or potentially scrutiny) of MFT platforms across our client base. Across industries, MFT solutions often went unnoticed by executives, the transfer of data simply worked, and leaders of companies did not have a large interest in, or knowledge of, the mechanisms by which data was moved into and out of the business. Suddenly, MFT solutions find themselves under the microscope and our team here has seen a huge increase in the amount of time being dedicated to ensuring data is protected both in transit and at rest.
A lot of this new-found interest in MFT by senior executives comes after several well-publicised breaches that utilised vulnerabilities in MFT solutions. Companies suddenly needed to ensure that their systems were not at risk. To add further fuel to the fire, the vulnerabilities found prompted many heavy-hitters in the market to up their game when it came to penetration testing, which led to a flurry of vulnerabilities being identified and remediated by vendors.
We are now regularly seeing the choice of MFT solution being driven by the vendor's response to past breaches and their efforts to improve the quality of their vulnerability management policies. Of course, the support provided by Pro2col and the vendors in providing remediations and context to vulnerabilities has also had a major impact on client MFT platforms and the trust placed upon them.
One of the key pieces of industry insight that has come from the last year has been the fundamental lack of knowledge around file transfer technology and the struggle to recruit experienced, expert-level file transfer staff. With the spotlight now firmly on file transfer, our support and consultancy teams have seen a 204% increase in the amount of requests for information coming into our support desk, and a push to get our teams to deliver or consult on migrations and upgrades. This could be due to 2 reasons:
Over the last year point 1 has been in evidence with the rise in requests we have received for training. This comes in many forms, either clients purchasing our Certified File Transfer Professional accreditation, clients booking product-specific training with one of our consultants, or clients attending our product specific training bootcamps. Whichever route clients choose for their training, it is fantastic to see that this knowledge gap is being tackled head on and Pro2col have the services to enable this empowerment.
Point 2 emerges from the continued shift away from in house expertise for niche tools as clients have been exploring and purchasing more SaaS solutions, shifting responsibility for the infrastructure and product updates to the vendor. We have also seen this with our own hosting platform, CloudMFT, becoming more popular as an option to bridge the gap between on-premise and SaaS. In some cases, with high staff turnover, training a constant stream of technical staff can be expensive and therefore limiting the requirement of staff to be held responsible for the platform is more cost effective.
In any case, changing opinions and visibility of MFT platforms has had a huge impact on the discussions Pro2col are having with clients, and I only expect these security-centric discussions to become more in-depth and critical to decision making throughout 2025.
High Availability, Disaster Recovery and Data Loss Prevention
Richard has been working in the field of file transfer and middleware for around twenty years. One of the reasons why Richard loves tech is his curious nature. Tech is constantly evolving, so he is always trying the latest tech releases and testing their limits. Follow Richard on LinkedIn.
As a Managed File Transfer Consultant, I spend a great deal of time talking to both existing and new users of managed file transfer systems. This often allows me to spot trends in preferences and requirements for varying levels of organisations, and this last year has been no different.
High Availability as a Growing Priority
It seems that as MFT systems are becoming a more critical component of an organisations architecture, the need to have a system highly available is also getting pushed higher up in the wish lists that I see. That’s not so say that this is true for all organisations that I talk to; there are still some that are happy to start small and reinforce their systems only as reliance upon them grows.
Perhaps the biggest shift that I am seeing is for the database component of managed file transfer to be handed off more readily to cloud providers in terms of a SaaS solution. This makes the whole need for database high availability someone else’s problem, which seems to go down very well with many people who are hosting their MFT systems in Azure and AWS.
Active-Active Disaster Recovery
Back to the core MFT system, the balance of interest between active-passive systems, active-active systems and disaster recovery that I have received seems to have changed somewhat; previously I would estimate that this would be 10% A:P, 40% A:A and 50% DR. Now it seems that it Active-Active systems have overtaken reliance on disaster recovery in terms of preference, and requests for active-passive have dwindled even further. I expect this to continue through 2025 too. A trend that I am seeing however is that more organisations are looking for BOTH Highly available Active-Active clusters AND Disaster Recovery. This used to come up occasionally but seems to be increasingly common, especially in larger organisations that need to have a more bulletproof disaster management plan in place. Perhaps it’s the ability to fail over to another region when considering cloud hosting, but I am also seeing it for physical datacentres too.
Antivirus and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Integration
Finally, another area that I have seen become more important to businesses is the whole antivirus and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) aspect of MFT. Again, this is not true for all organisations, although even the smallest organisations have AV on their wishlist. Use of ICAP enabled scanners seems to be more popular than ever, despite some organisations having reservations about using ICAP with very large files. I would have to say that I have seen the uptake of ICAP probably double over the last year, with the need for AV scanning far outweighing DLP scanning. That’s not to say that there is little interest in DLP, there has been growth in interest there which I expect to see continue.
The Role of AI in MFT
I think it will an extremely interesting year to see how MFT vendors position artificial intelligence (AI) & machine learning (ML) in their development roadmaps, considering the potential benefits that might be achieved. Personally, I’d like to see MFT vendors invest heavily, helping enterprise businesses along their AI journey. The opportunities, efficiency gains and improvements to security posture are (almost) endless.
For example, AI options might include the integration of chatbots to act as self-service interfaces for internal stakeholders to interact with MFT systems, such as understanding the status of transfers, rather than sifting through logs; integration with AI powered threat detection solutions to proactively head off brute force attacks or hacking attempts aiding cybersecurity posture; moving beyond simple reporting to context aware decision making by understanding the financial impact of specific transfers and their failure or simply understanding that solution usage patterns are outside of normal parameters which might indicate inappropriate activities allowing for near real time reaction, and much more.
As enterprise businesses clamour to leverage their data in AI initiatives, I suspect MFT solutions will be seen integral and critical to securing batch processes, providing protocol support and configurable routing to extend the ingestion and dissemination of data or results.
I think we’re some way off having an AI solution that has the ability to automate the onboarding or offboarding supply chain partners, due to the complexity of the information required, the variety of systems to interface with and the enormity of the project for an MFT vendor. It won’t be long off though!
Embrace Autonomous IT Operations
All eyes are on IT teams to drive measurable business success while managing time-intensive projects that align with AI and strategic technology goals. As a result, IT leaders are seeking new levels of efficiency across all systems, teams and processes. Self-sufficient workflows will be essential for enterprises to achieve their objectives.
The ability to allow systems to automate manual processes, including file transfers, is nothing new. For years, Managed File Transfer (MFT) solutions have enabled IT teams to automate routine and repetitive tasks by scheduling operations that pull, process and push files wherever needed.
In 2025, IT leaders will be looking to move beyond basic tasks to file transfer orchestration. The complexities of hybrid architectures, compliance regulations and evolving business needs necessitate automation that can handle intricate scenarios without human intervention. Developing advanced logic-based workflows will help MFT solutions respond to real-time triggers, facilitate delivery and notify teams of status updates and outcomes. For more predictions to unlock new levels of operational efficiency, check out our blog.
Be Ready for the Post-Quantum Era!
Making predictions for the New Year is something of a tradition in tech, and I enjoy participating with prognostications that have ranged from whimsical, to practical, and hopeful. Will people really join an Amish community to retreat from the multitudinous threats and complexities that come with today’s technology dependency? Probably not, but I included that in my 2024 forecast for the popular VMBlog.
This year, I think we’re going to see many and more serious threats overlooked thanks to a fixation on artificial intelligence. The biggest threat at risk of being overlooked? A lack of preparedness for the imminent post-quantum era.
While the world is agog over all the things generative AI can do, it seems unconcerned that Google recently crossed an important threshold with error suppression in qubit processing, bringing us one enormous step closer to viable quantum computing at scale. When that happens, public key cryptography—the security on which we rely for all digital communications—will be obsolete. Encryption algorithms that would take traditional computers millions of years to solve will fall to a quantum computer in a matter of moments. That’s frightening stuff!
To avoid being caught unawares there are things we can do today, including adopting support for elliptical curve cryptography or one of the “post quantum” encryption standards recently published by NIST. Then, since these are only theoretical fixes (they can’t be put to the test until there is a viable quantum computer to test them), keep track of developments and be ready for the day when quantum computing is a reality.
Diplomat MFT already supports elliptical curve cryptography, and our next version will include support for the NIST post-quantum standards. We’ll be ready. What about you? Follow us on LinkedIn to keep in touch.
As we move into 2025, the Managed File Transfer landscape shows no signs of slowing down. From a heightened focus on security and vulnerability management to the rising demand for automation, high availability, AI integration, and even mention of a post-quantum era, businesses must be proactive, staying informed and prepared to adapt to new trends and threats while maximising the value of their file transfer solutions.
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