The Ultimate Guide to Migrating Your File Transfer Solution

You may have found yourself on this page because your current managed file transfer (MFT) software isn’t fully meeting your business's changing needs. With the increasing workload IT teams face – from managing daily operations, maintaining software systems addressing cybersecurity threats, creating projects, responding to partner requests, providing support to internal teams, and staying compliant with regulations – it’s imperative that your file transfer solution is keeping up with these demands.

Migrating your managed file transfer system can seem like a daunting task, but the reality is, the new secure file transfer solution may be easier to use, more user friendly, and offer you more features such as automation, easy web access, scaling, alerting, high availability, that’ll streamline your business processes.

In this article, we’ll explore why you should consider migrating your file transfer solution, the challenges of migration, the benefits of switching, and other key factors to keep in mind for a smooth transition.

Why would you consider migrating to a different managed file transfer (MFT) solution?

There are many reasons why you might want to move your file transfer solution, including:

• • You’re looking for a more cost-effective solution

  • With data breaches and cyber threats on the rise, you’re concerned about the lack of security features on offer from your current solution, such as end-to-end encryption, secure authentication methods, and compliance with industry standards, that may expose your sensitive data to potential risks

  • The solution may not provide the levels of reliability your business demands

  • You need real-time success and failure reporting to meet critical file transfer deadlines

  • Your existing solution doesn’t provide a comprehensive, consolidated audit trail for file transfers as well as all system changes

  • Your business is growing and you need your MFT to grow and scale with you

  • Your current solution may not provide a consolidated platform for both system to system automation and person to system ad-hoc processing

  • You’re looking to boost overall business performance

  • You need a file transfer solution that leverages more automation to enable end-to-end business processes

  • Your MFT solution has been acquired by another company, leading to uncertainty about future support and features

  • Your solution provider has announced its end-of-life (EOL) date for your current system, leaving you with limited time to transition to a new solution
    
    

If you already have an established file transfer solution from one of the larger market vendors, the likelihood that you would need to migrate away from it for performance or feature purposes is rather low. Most of the market-leading file transfer products offer similar levels of functionality. However, you are much more likely to need to adopt a new file transfer solution if you have a home-grown tool in place, or a base level file transfer system that only offers limited capabilities or scope for expansion. On occasion we see price point changes as a trigger for customers to assess the market and investigate lower-priced options. Our review of the MFT marketplace provides an at-a-glance assessment of the top MFT software solutions available, and is worth checking out if you are considering a move. That said, if price point is your key motivation, it's worth highlighting that most MFT tools are subject to price increases, and often the cost of migrating can have a significant impact on the short to medium term total cost of ownership (TCO).

Of course, there is also the small chance that you have fallen out of love with your current offering and are looking to move to a new product.

If any of the points above are relevant to your situation, the question you will now want to know the answer to is ‘how easy is it to migrate my current MFT solution?’ The honest answer is, it's not that simple. However, with the support of our file transfer experts, you won't need to worry.

How easy it to migrate to an alternative file transfer solution? 

Migrating a file transfer solution is complex, and not just from the perspective of design, build, data migration, licensing and implementation of a new system. There are also other things you need to think about relating to the environment that the system will sit within, and to its new user communities. Some of the peripheral things to consider in a migration are:

• • Downtime planning

  • System administration capabilities and controls

  • System roles and responsibilities and user access levels

  • Data conversion and migration planning and responsibilities

  • System testing plans

  • Security, compliance, system backup and recovery processes

  • Hosting options

  • Automation capabilities

  • Database integration

  • Existing workflows

  • Cloud connections

  • Staff training

  • Pricing models and cost analysis

Assessing your current file transfer solution

Before considering a new file transfer system, it's also vital to assess how well your current solution does, or does not, meet your current and future business needs. It's likely that you can relate to at least one of the pain points mentioned earlier, and that you have a sense of where your system may be letting you down. It is important to analyse precisely how, and where, your system is not performing to meet expectations, and which capabilities it is lacking.

Once you have identified the specific areas of security, compliance, reliability, or functionality that are pitfalls in your system, you're then ready to look in the market for potential replacement systems that can address these weaknesses.

If you have concerns about this analysis phase, Pro2col can take the pressure of by performing a MFT full health check on your existing solution. We can ask the right questions and facilitate the conversations necessary to uncover the cause of current system issues. From there, you can identify your list of additional system requirements before you go to market. Pro2col, as a vendor-agnostic file transfer specialist, can also advise you which products in the market will best meet your new requirements.

Exploring alternative file transfer solutions in the marketplace

The file transfer marketplace is a crowded one, and it is very likely that, since setting up your file transfer infrastructure, new and better tools may have come to market. The question that you should now be able to answer after following the steps above is this - which of these tools may better meet your needs? As seasoned experts in the file transfer space, and we continually review the tools out in the marketplace. We also have an MFT comparison tool, and our best software tools page, both of which provide valuable set of initial information to support anyone embarking on such a system change.

Other things to consider before choosing to migrate

In addition to understanding the weaknesses and needs of your system there are some additional things to consider, such as new processes for upgrading and staying compliant, as well as the cost of support and any additional modules, or increased licence costs in the future.

Importantly, budget constraints may also factor into your migration approach. The budget available for any new system may drive the consideration of a subscription-based model for your licences, rather than a one-hit costed, perpetual, licenced model. There may also be a need to start with a sub-set of priority modules in a new system, with a phased plan to integrate additional modules in future years as the relevant functional requirements come on-stream.

The complexity of your current MFT requirements should be taken into consideration when looking to migrate. Do you have a considerable amount of projects running, a substantial amount of connections with third parties, or complex workflows which will need expertise to move across and reconfigure for a new system? All of these complexities will need to be factored in when looking at the time and management involved, as well as the skillset of the team performing the migration.

As I'm sure you can appreciate from the long list of migration tasks to consider, there are large risks if the migration is not done correctly first time. If system design and planning stages were not given the necessary thought, then the migration could result in maintenance-heavy, manual, processes that do not leverage the very benefits you expected from your new system. A new system migration is also an opportunity to finesse any current system automations, extracting the base logic, re-designing actions, and greatly improving the efficiency of existing automated tasks where requirements may have grown organically over time. This means you can optimise your system from the outset, ultimately providing the more efficient and robust solution you were after in the first place.

Onboarding a new tool can always be challenging - and both internal and partner/supplier training and onboarding is a vital step in the migration process, one which we often see neglected until issues and satisfaction with the new solution has already cemented in negatively.

How long does it take to move to an alternative file transfer solution?

There's no way around it – migrating a file transfer system is a big project. Nevertheless, with a detailed understanding of the deliverables, priorities, and timescales, and with equally rigorous project management, a migration can start to reap benefits quickly through a phased implementation approach.

A simple migration of a few internal workflows and minimal data throughput may just take 2 – 5 days to complete. A more complex solution with several third-party connections, hundreds of workflows, a large user base and terabytes of data could take a month or two. A more enterprise-level migration of thousands of projects, complex workflows, hundreds or thousands of third-party connections, petabytes of data, and business critical service which cannot be interrupted could take 3 months, or even span several years.

Whatever the scale, the correct approach of analysing current systems, scoping a new system, participating in demos, completing a proof-of-concept, project planning, and providing appropriate communication internally and externally will certainly add time to the migration. This is, however, a necessity for a successful migration.

The answer to these potential hurdles is to utilise us, the managed file transfer experts. We know how file transfer systems work, and we can support you with everything from finding the right file transfer solution, through design, planning, data conversion, system set-up, testing, implementation, and training. We also provide ongoing product support and can provide a hosting platform for those of you that do not have the resources (or appetite) to manage the hosting in-house.

So, should I stick with my existing MFT solution?

The slightly unhelpful answer is that it depends. It's is not an easy task to move your file transfer solution. There are a lot of questions that need to be answered before you attempt a migration, and a significant amount of analysis to be completed around both your current and future needs, your business priorities, and your company’s compliance requisites.

Having said all that, I will leave you with this last thought…

If you think a migration of your existing file transfer infrastructure is too overwhelming or too complex to take on… perhaps then, consider the cost of not taking action.

Think about the time and effort involved to maintain and support your current solution on a day-to-day basis, not to mention the additional cost to your teams as they work to manually complete processes that could be fully automated end-to-end. These manual interventions, repeated over and over, consume valuable resources that could otherwise be better spent in other areas of the business. Moreover, the cost of not migrating a system that will soon be end of life, or one which is not receiving regular updates or the attention of developers, poses serious risks. Vulnerabilities in outdated systems are prime targets for security breaches. The cost of downtime, often resulting from these vulnerabilities, can cause immeasurable damage and disruption to your business - not to mention the price of replacing hardware, patching software, and dealing with ongoing cyber threats.

So, while migrating your file transfer system might feel like a challenge, the cost of not migrating could be detrimental. Migrating from an established file transfer system can be a time-consuming and challenging project to undertake and should be done with care and deliberation. If you’re not sure and you’d like some expert advice – get in touch. We’ve run dozens of migrations for clients, from small tactical changes through to enterprise businesses needing large scale strategic migrations. We can help you avoid some of the common pitfalls and realise a return on your investment.

Speak to an MFT Expert

Are you considering a switch from your current file transfer solution? Schedule a discovery call with our team of experts today and we’ll guide you through the process and explore tailored solutions that fit your needs perfectly.

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