Tidal™ Enterprise Adapter for SFTP/FTP/FTPS

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Increasingly, businesses are working to integrate their own internal operations and also to develop closer links with partners and customers. Companies in financial services, insurance, healthcare, and retail among other industries depend on seamless data exchange to integrate their operations with others and to allow them to respond with the speed and accuracy the market demands. Today, approximately 70 percent of data and application integration is accomplished through batch jobs. As a result, the application integration and file transfer capabilities—and the ease of use of your job scheduler—are critical to accomplishing this goal reliably and cost effectively.

The technology most commonly used to exchange data or transfer files among applications and partners is the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). As you extend business processes across your value chain, the reliability and security of data exchange with partners and customers is increasingly critical to your business. Transmission delays, breached security, and corrupted data can impact not only your business but the relationship with your partners and customers. The exchange of data between applications, partners, and customers must be so reliable and secure that you can take it for granted. To provide this level of reliability, data and file exchange must be an integral part of your business process. And because there is a close relationship between data exchange and your organization’s batch processes, both must be seamlessly and simultaneously managed to attain the high levels of automation, security, speed, recovery, and accuracy required.

The Challenge

In many companies, processing file transfers is still manual. For example, a company may have a business process in which a customer sends a file containing all orders for the day via FTP. During the day, the operations staff manually checks to see if the file has arrived. If it has, they submit a series of jobs that process the order. Or they may use scripts they have written to manage this process.

This manual business process creates several significant issues for your business:

• FTP is inherently insecure and transfers data without encryption. User names, passwords, FTP commands, and the files themselves can be viewed using packet sniffers
• The process of recognizing that the file has arrived and submitting the jobs is inherently error prone and time consuming. Failure to meet service level agreements with your customers may incur costly financial penalties and erode customer satisfaction
• If scripts are used, they are costly to create, document, and maintain
• If scripts are used, user IDs and passwords may be embedded in the scripts, creating additional exposure to security risks
• If the manual process of managing FTP is related to financial reporting, additional issues are involved in auditing this process. One operator may be required to implement the manual procedure and another to verify that the procedure was followed
• The need for both a job scheduler and an FTP product adds unnecessary cost and complexity
• FTP may require that an additional agent is installed on both the sending and receiving end, increasing system complexity
• There is no single point of control that manages both the FTP requirement and the batch components of the business process, adding to your management costs

Tidal Enterprise Scheduler offers the easiest to use, most powerful solution available to manage FTP dependencies within your job schedules and the application integration they support. With Enterprise Scheduler, you can manage file transfers as an integral part of your critical batch business processes.

Tidal Enterprise Scheduler can radically simplify the process of managing batch processes with FTP dependencies:

• Supports both FTP and Secure File Transfer Protocols (SFTP) using SSH2
• Avoids sending data “in the clear” by supporting AES, DES, SDES, and Blowfish encryption techniques
• Provides “script-free,” scheduled FTP processing to avoid further security exposure created by embedded user IDs and passwords where scripts are used
• Supports FTP job dependencies based on the number of files and volume of data transferred, dropped files, and duration of transfer
• Avoids the cost and complexity of a separate FTP tool
• Manages the attributes of files and their directories
• Requires a single FTP server rather than an FTP agent on the sending and receiving ends
• Provides a single point of control for managing business processes dependent on FTP and batch jobs

Tidal Enterprise Scheduler provides you with an integration platform for all your job scheduling needs. When your batch jobs complete, they can automatically transfer files as part of your business process. In addition, when files arrive, they can trigger one or more jobs to process the data transferred. You can now eliminate the manual steps or scripting that undermines your service levels and the cost of managing IT.

And Tidal Enterprise Scheduler makes it easy to accomplish these objectives by using the same interface to manage FTP jobs and dependencies that it uses for all jobs and dependencies.