axway.com

The cloud has set a very high bar for the experience users expect, and made it oh-so-easy for business lines to bypass IT with click-subscribe-use-pay-as-you-go access to unsanctioned cloud services. IT organizations that fail to meet the demand for IT-as- a-service run the risk of internal customers choosing IT services from the external cloud, creating a “shadow IT” culture that puts the company at risk.

By being your own cloud for enterprise MFT, you can meet the unique file-transfer requirements of multiple groups and lines of business with one shared infrastructure. Departments and divisions have the autonomy to manage connectivity and transfers for their partners and customers, while IT maintains centralized control with global policy enforcement for security and compliance.

Here are nine keys to ensuring your MFT shared service is a success:

01Invoke and empower a Center of Excellence (COE)

The job of the Center of Excellence (COE) is to establish best practices for defining and managing new flows and making sure that they are followed consistently. The owners of

MFT technology should have a deep understanding of the technology itself, when to use it and how it fits into the organization’s integration stack.

02Keep your eye on the prize — the data flow

For MFT as a shared service, taking a data flow point of view enables you to align business requirements with file-flow definitions and establish a central infrastructure for managing and securing the complete lifecycle for all file flows. By building your MFT shared service with a focus on governing and providing visibility into data flows — the route of a file, including its source, destination and intermediate stops — you can provide the business with a living representation of a business process, which is critical for SLA and regulatory compliance.

Outshine “Shadow IT”— Be Your Own Cloud

9KEYS TO ELIMINATING SHADOW ITWITH A DIGITAL MFT SHARED SERVICE

03Support all file exchange patterns… eventually

Your initial goal is to gain acceptance and trust from the businesses you serve. Start by supporting reusable patterns and simple integration domains — the communications side of system-centric B2B, for example, or shared folders for people-centric collaboration. After you have achieved success with initial pilot customers and your COE is up and running, you can work on supporting all file-exchange patterns.

04Be everything your customers love about the cloud

Why does shadow IT exist? Because of the precedent set by the cloud. So be a cloud by offering self-service capabilities, elastic scalability, shared infrastructure and a tenant-isolation mechanism. Also consider metering and subscription-based payment.

Copyright © Axway 2017. All Rights Reserved.

AXWAY_CK_9_KEYS_ELIMINATING_SHADOW_IT_EN_052417axway.com

05Commit to SLAs

If you are to earn your organization’s trust, stakeholders need to know you’ll meet the obligations of the business by committing to — and consistently meeting — service levels. Keep in mind that each business unit will consider itself your most important customer. Be able to commit contractually to SLAs by ensuring that your infrastructure is ready for the unexpected with elastic scalability and 99.999 percent uptime. The COE should also define when advanced functionality like bandwidth prioritization and file-transfer acceleration is the best way to meet SLAs.

06Compete (and win) against shadow IT with a service that empowers and adds value

Focus on being a superior service organization to gain a competitive advantage over shadow IT. First and foremost:

axway.com/boost

Ready to step out of the shadows?

LEARN MORE

• Offer choice and autonomy. Empower your communities to serve and manage themselves without waiting for help from IT. Make them want to use your service because it is better than the alternative.

• Deliver added value. Offer enhanced visibility and audit capabilities that public cloud services can’t provide.

07Partner with experience for cloud integration (hybrid IT)

Consider partnering with an experienced MFT provider who can host and/or manage your private cloud. Hybrid managed services offer the added benefits of outside IT infrastructure and expertise, so you can delegate management to an external staff that is leveraging a catalog of services and SLA-based tasks. Ultimately, the infrastructure can be moved to the cloud to leverage immediate availability, flexibility and elasticity with no capital expenditure required.

08Change your diet: enable app developers to consume MFT services using APIs

Gain agility with a software-defined infrastructure by using REST API or folder monitoring to reduce coupling it with applications.

App developers create new business functions with apps that leverage data and services – including MFT services – using APIs. MFT services become part of the business application lifecycle by being exposed through an IT Service Management (ITSM) portal. Ultimately, the MFT service used is integrated within the application DevOps loop.

09Enforce corporate governance — without shackles

In the wild west of shadow IT, you must make compliance effortless and offer a service that the business will want to adopt. You must provide self-service that makes it more attractive than noncompliance. You must make it all but impossible for your users to break the rules and put the company at risk.

You can do this with a shared service that provides the best of both worlds: control and flexibility for MFT involving humans, trading partners and data flows that drive complex business processes. You can meet regulatory, corporate, partner, industry and legal compliance requirements, without shackling the very people who need the autonomy to innovate and accelerate business.