We use it for data transfer with certain software vendors and partners. We also use it for back-and-forth customer data transfers for deposits. We also send data back to our customers for statements and reconciliation. We use it for system-to-system integration internally and we also use their secure upload feature for secure file sharing between teams and customers. We use it for just about every use case available.

It has been a couple of years since we started doing data transfer directly with our customers. We started with system integration, so we were just moving data back and forth between us and our software vendors. We stepped into the customer side of it in the last six years or so.

We use SecureForms for things like mortgage closings and secure document uploads from customers who have loans in progress. We also use it for internal operations for data handoffs between teams to securely send files. We do an encryption layer on top of that, so it works very well for us in sending data back and forth all over the company.

GoAnywhere MFT has saved us time in connecting securely with third parties for different resources. We can typically get set up with a new vendor after getting through security protocols in about two days. It works pretty well for us.

It probably saves us anywhere from four to eight hours a month in operations. We onboard new platforms once or twice a quarter. For customers, we upload the data to them versus them downloading from us. It is the same thing. We do five or six of those per month. It works out pretty well. It allows us to set things up, and if we have to make a tweak, it is quick. For example, if a customer makes a change, it is a matter of quick config change rather than us spending hours refactoring code to handle that. It works pretty well. We get four to eight hours per month of time savings as compared to other platforms.

The most valuable feature is customer data transfers for traditional SFTP. Some of our biggest customers are on the platform, and it works out very well for us as a big selling point.

On the platform side, I would like to see some improvements in the dashboarding and telemetry data. We take a lot of that data today, and we end up writing some custom dashboards so that we can run the day to day operations. We are sending and receiving millions of dollars a day, and for us, the dashboards are a bit lacking. It works great if you have one job that needs to run successfully. However, depending on how you build it, there may be dependencies that fail, and you may need to do certain alerting to teams and things of that nature. What we are looking at right now is potentially rebuilding our dashboard a second time to improve it a little bit further based on the operations of the team. We would love to see some improvements there. That is one area where they could improve. Everything else is the best of the business from what I have seen.

We have been using MST for over ten years.

Its stability is fine. I run architecture in addition to integration. We look at how critical applications are to our environment and our business. GoAnywhere MFT is in the top three most critical ones for us in terms of what has to run consistently and resiliency. We send and receive data all day long. GoAnywhere is, knock on wood, bulletproof for us. It works very well. In the last two years that I have run the platform, we have had one major outage, and that was something we did. It was not the platform's fault.

Its scalability has been very good. We have not run into a lot of issues with that. We just implemented clustering to preemptively get in front of that, but from a scale perspective, we never get complaints from our customers on the speed of upload or download. We consistently have 99.9% or 99.99% uptime. It works very well for us.

Their support is good. We have a good relationship with customer support, our account manager, and the consulting arm. We leverage all three. From the last several years, we know how to do the dance and navigate support challenges. Sometimes there are things that we spend consulting hours on. If it is a bigger problem and we have a production incident and the services would not turn back on, we know that we can count on Fortra to get back to us. Normally, it takes less than a couple of hours to fix an issue, so we lean on them pretty heavily for things of that nature, and then we meet with our consulting arm every week for improvement opportunities and long-range planning-type items.

I would rate them a nine out of ten. I would give them a ten if the resolution on the first call was better. That is the only improvement area right now. With as many customers as they have, that is probably not going to happen. They cannot justify it.

It was already in place when I got here. I have used IBM Sterling Integrator and Amazon AWS S3 in previous organizations.

IBM Sterling Integrator is closest to GoAnywhere MFT. It is a lot older. It does not have as modern architecture as GoAnywhere MFT, but it is close from an operational perspective. It basically works with everything, which is what you want in file transfer, but the management of IBM Sterling Integrator is difficult as compared to GoAnywhere MFT. With GoAnywhere MFT, once we have built a job five or six times, we can do it pretty fast. Things like clustering and high availability and the fact that it has got web components put it over the edge for us.

We are still one of their old-school on-prem clients. We like having control.

It was already in place when I got here. We went through an upgrade and a clustering implementation last week. The engagement was very good. It was a lot faster than a lot of the other vendors we have worked with in the past. I was expecting that it would take us three months, but we got the implementation done in about a month. We had all the servers and the other things ready which saved time, but for what we were looking at doing, I thought it would take three times longer, so it was good.

From the stories I have heard of onboarding or from the secondhand information based on my talking to some of the other engineers in the past, it took us about three months to get comfortable with the solution. We onboarded another team member to the solution this year. It took him about two months of being trained by our other engineers to get the hang of it. He has never worked on file transfer before, so there were some basics that we had to get out of the way in the first few weeks.

It requires pretty routine maintenance. We do things like security patches. We take all the updates that Fortra pushes out, and then there are the occasional security tweaks or things of that nature to the platform itself. A lot of that has to do with the way we deploy it. We are in a highly regulated environment, but not all Fortra customers have to deal with that.

If I were to give a TCO number on the maintenance side, maintenance licenses are pretty competitive in the market. Our maintenance total is probably around 50,000. From an FTE perspective, managing that infrastructure requires probably half of an FTE, so our TCO for a given year is probably 100,000, which is not bad for a solution of its size and capabilities.

Its pricing is fair. It is not the most expensive, and it is not the cheapest. For what we get in our environment, the pricing model works pretty well.

With file transfer, if you were to move to an S3 pricing model where you are paying for the storage, for large organizations, that tends to be cost-prohibitive because technology is often viewed as a cost center. So, you do not have a way to offset those things unless you start charging fees. We charge a very small fee for file transfer services, but if we were to change to a platform that did pay-for-consumption instead of pay-per-seat licensing, we would have to rethink our file transfer ops for sure.

We reviewed other solutions on the market during renewals but found GoAnywhere to be the best fit for us.

From what I have seen, other teams that run file transfer platforms for other organizations of our size normally need at least one extra FTE to manage what we do. We do it with about an FTE and a half, whereas other teams need three or four engineers. They often need one person dedicated to running the system itself, let alone building out any automation. We have one guy who does all that.

Overall, based on the other players in the market, GoAnywhere MFT is a ten out of ten for us. They have the right blend. While there are always going to be improvement areas, especially for the price, it is a slam dunk. It is hard to say to go with another solution because it is very stable.

The most common use case is secure file transfer. Fortra's web client provides that. SecureMail also helps them send emails with large file attachments.

We realized the benefits of GoAnywhere immediately. So many threats affect the most commonly used types of file transfers. One common way to transfer files is to put them on a flash drive, which is risky. Webmail also has limitations. You can only send around 25 MB through Outlook and Gmail. GoAnywhere is helpful and secure because it allows different protocols and encryption supported by the strongest, most secure encryption algorithms.

GoAnywhere saves time when connecting to third parties because it's easily configured. It saves more time than other kinds of file transfer applications. It's user friendly and easy to configure.

I like the versatility GoAnywhere provides, allowing transfers through HTTPS and different protocols. It can also transfer through a server and a client.

GoAnywhere's connectors are helpful for connecting and integrating various products, such as Google Cloud, AWS Cloud, Azure, and SharePoint. This makes it much easier for our clients to achieve their targets. The connectors are critical because production processes need them to connect between two applications. It helps to maintain a smooth connection between two products.

We use GoAnywhere's agents instead of the more commonly used Samba or network share. The agents are good for a company with branches globally or nationwide. It allows the branches to connect to the head offices.

The secure forms are helpful. One of my clients is in the HR department, so using secure forms to collect details from job applicants is easy. They can be compiled in a specific folder or directory so that HR can easily navigate and manage all the details of prospective employees applying to a certain company.

For some clients, we recommend GoFast for companies that need transparency between the first and second clients. If they both use GoAnywhere, we suggest GoFast since it will speed up the file transfers between them.

I tried to copy a file from an S3 bucket to another storage class. I don't know if it is a limitation from AWS, not the MFT. If I copy a file from the AWS S3 bucket to that storage class, it can't be transferred. It says that I can't remember the exact error, but it cannot be processed. I want MFT to be more compatible with cloud-based applications or services like AWS.

I have used GoAnywhere for almost two years.

GoAnywhere MFT doesn't have any stability problems. Any crashes are related to the client's services or problems with their database. We sometimes encounter lags when there is so much data that the donor cannot trust.

GoAnywhere is easy to scale up. It isn't time-consuming to scale GoAnywhere MFT up.

I rate Fortra's support nine out of 10. I've reported bugs to Fortra support. The issues take time and can't be fixed with a press of a button. It would be helpful if Fortra's support would regularly update us since our partners and clients in the Philippines have problems that require expertise on the backend. There are some cases they cannot provide answers.

Our clients have different platforms. We deploy in cloud, hybrid, or sometimes on-premise because other clients do not trust a hybrid or cloud environment. We haven't encountered difficulties with GoAnywhere itself. We've had much more problems on the client's side.

We typically assign at least two resources for the deployment so we have a backup. Implementing GoAnywhere itself takes half a day, but setting up the client's environment requires an entire day. The only maintenance after deployment is upgrading the solution and migrating it from one environment to another.

Even if you think the price is high, I would recommend GoAnywhere because it is secure and easy to use and configure. It supports different kinds of protocols. It resolves the limitations of common types of file transfers.

I rate Fortra GoAnywhere MFT 10 out of 10.