Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT for Linux (BYOL)

I am a distributor. We deal with Solpac Thailand and Solpac Japan, and for types of companies that I usually recommend, GoAnywhere MFT  is my choice. We have many partners, but the main partner is Fortra, which features I find most valuable in GoAnywhere MFT .

We have integrated with some requirements for services such as Salesforce , SharePoint , and Microsoft Dynamics  because customers needed integration with SharePoint  or SAML single sign-on.

The range of connectors that GoAnywhere MFT  provides out-of-the-box is very valuable because you can easily set up and connect and integrate with SharePoint.

My customers make use of GoAnywhere Agents.

For now, I think GoAnywhere MFT  can be improved because the admin portal has some monitors and admin features. Some log details cannot be shown because we have to use the terminal to access logs and read through XML. If it were possible to show this on the admin console, it would be better.

Because of the time difference between Thailand and the USA, the initial setup could be improved regarding technical support. When we have a request, the time zones do not match. We need to schedule and check and try to confirm when they have a time that matches with Thailand.

I have been dealing with GoAnywhere MFT for approximately 16 years.

I would rate the after-sales service from Fortra at four stars on a five-star scale. Their technical support receives a rating of four out of ten from me.

I have experience with four products: MOVEit , Control-M , IBM Sterling, and HAF. GoAnywhere MFT is the best one for me because MOVEit  does not have easy configuration and also has problems when installed on the cloud. HAF also presents configuration and interface that is not user-friendly. Control-M  is always kept secretive, and technical aspects are not easy to learn independently. IBM Sterling is also not easy to use.

Nothing is difficult about the initial setup, and deploying GoAnywhere MFT is easy. GoAnywhere MFT is simple to install, download, and access. Instructions are easy to obtain and download. There are also many videos available through YouTube and social media that everyone can access and learn from independently.

In Thailand, GoAnywhere MFT is the only major player in managed file transfer, and I do not see any good competition to GoAnywhere MFT on the market because it is convenient for Thai people. MOVEit and HAF are not real competitors. Control-M MFT is also not a competitor. When we compare all functions, GoAnywhere MFT is the best choice for customers.

Sometimes customers use Secure Form for making questionnaires to get customer responses when they have registered the application through Secure Form.

We often use GoFast because customers need to transfer large files through a network from one location to another, and they use GoFast to accelerate data transmission.

Because GoFast uses UDP protocol, it has affected some operations differently from TCP protocol. Some customers think UDP is unsecured and cannot track transactions. However, GoAnywhere MFT has special features to make UDP stable. Customers can track transactions that are transferred through UDP, and with GoAnywhere MFT, UDP can use hashing to verify data from the original source.

Some customers use Secure Form, though not extensively. In Thailand, customers have in-house developed electronic forms.

The price is reasonable because GoAnywhere MFT is flexible and can apply to customer work scenarios. It has a friendly interface and is easy to understand. GoAnywhere MFT is no-coding; you just use GoAnywhere MFT workflow and nodes without coding.

Sometimes, when presenting GoAnywhere MFT to small and medium-sized companies in Thailand, they only want to use GoAnywhere MFT for transferring data but do not need to use certified certificates. These companies are not focused on security; they just want to use managed file transfer with automation. However, GoAnywhere MFT has specific security features. If a company does not need to apply security into the system, they may think GoAnywhere MFT functionality is expensive. The GoAnywhere MFT license is expensive for companies that only want to use file transfer without security.

If we can choose what to improve, it is the monitoring, and I have already mentioned that the monitoring and technical support could be improved as well. I would rate this review nine out of ten.

My usual use cases for GoAnywhere MFT  are for automatic processes with SFTP.

The features and capabilities of GoAnywhere MFT  that I have found most valuable are the projects that allow us to build different templates with extensive customization. We can customize the entire project as needed and create if-else statements in any way we would like to find any pattern or different words inside files, archive them, and unzip them. There is a very flexible and extended way to automate processes exactly the way we are looking for.

A benefit I have seen over the two years that I have been working with GoAnywhere MFT  is that we can use the MFT  as a parameter between our customers and our company, and we can automate all processes with file exchange and sending files through GoAnywhere MFT. It is easy and automating a lot of processes and work. Using it with different customers via PGP allows us to encrypt and unencrypt all the traffic, which is very convenient and helpful.

Regarding the reporting about the logs, sometimes there is too much information. When looking for the exact way to find and troubleshoot different errors, the log can be very difficult to understand because there is a lot of information. When you have a log on a job that has a lot of files that have failed, there is a lot of data on one page, and it becomes more complicated to troubleshoot it and understand exactly the reason why it failed.

An example of an issue I had is that we experienced a problem where the agent service took a lot of time to start after a restart. We had a huge delay on the servers applying. I think that is an area where GoAnywhere MFT can improve itself, particularly regarding how it manages all the paths via the file server on the agent server.

I have been working with GoAnywhere MFT for almost two years.

The reliability and stability aspects of GoAnywhere MFT are very good. The platform is very stable if you maintain the infrastructure in the right way with proper change management and configuration management.

Regarding the level of scalability of GoAnywhere MFT, I do not really see scalability because it depends on the architecture and how many servers are deployed for the platform. About the jobs and the projects within the platform, I do not see a lot of scalability. You are creating a job and transferring files via SFTP, and that is it.

I communicate with the technical support of GoAnywhere MFT sometimes, depending on the issue. We are using BullWall for integration, so they are our support, and I am not speaking directly with GoAnywhere MFT. Their support is excellent. Overall, I would rate the technical support on a scale of one to ten as nine because there is always room for improvement.

Before GoAnywhere MFT, the company used CyberArk, but it was before my time.

GoAnywhere MFT was already integrated when I started working here. I did not participate in the initial setup or deployment.

From my perspective, I have seen tangible benefits, including return on investment, but it depends on the use case. Our company has hundreds of jobs that we are automating and there are a lot of gigabits of files that we are transferring and receiving. The benefit is obvious because doing that via other ways, especially on-premise, would be more difficult. I do not know exactly the price, but the benefit for us is huge.

I do not make use of GoAnywhere MFT's connectors for services such as Salesforce , SharePoint  Online, Dynamics 365 , or other services. The range of connectors that GoAnywhere MFT provides out of the box is probably good, but except for SFTP and a few jobs that we are using via HTTPS, we are not using any other connector. We may use another connector in the future, but only for a CDR platform, such as Opswat.

The importance of GoAnywhere MFT's connectors to my operations is significant as it is a production platform. All the connectors and all the ways we are using SFTP are production systems. If it becomes unavailable, there will be significant consequences for our company.

We have divided the environment between the DMZ for the MFT and the agent. The importance of GoAnywhere MFT's agents in enabling me to extend MFT automation to remote systems is that this is the core component for connecting to all NFS and file servers. Essentially, it is the core component for sending and receiving files into our company and has a huge impact as a core component within our architecture.

I do not use GoAnywhere MFT's secure forms. I do not use the GoFast feature to accelerate data transmission. I do not know if GoAnywhere MFT has saved me time in connecting securely with the third parties I need to collaborate with because there is all the negotiation about IPs, certificates, and usernames. However, it is easy today to set up a basic template to exchange with a third party or a client, and in the world of SFTP, there is not too much configuration to do for the initial connection.

My overall review rating for GoAnywhere MFT is eight.