Closing the Compliance Gap in File Exchange – Part I

If you missed our recent webinar with Forrester and SAP Insider titled “Closing the Compliance Gap in File Exchange”, here is a transcript of the portion presented by Forrester’s Ken Vollmer, a principal analyst in the analyst firm’s application development and delivery research group.

Ken Vollmer:  “It’s my pleasure to be with you today to discuss the increasing importance of managed file transfer.  I’ve been covering integration strategies and technology for the past several years and I’ve been particularly interested in what we’ve been seeing in the MFT space most recently.

Basically, we’re seeing a tremendous increase in MFT.  The interest is skyrocketing.  The number of client inquiries I have personally taken on MFT has soared since 2009.  We did a calculation last week and it was over 300% increase from 2009 to 2011 so something is obviously going on.  Typical questions we’re getting from customers about MFT is, “Who are the leading providers and what features should we be looking for in an MFT solution?”  The key question I want to delve into today is, “What’s driving this increase level of interest?”

There’s a couple of things that are driving the increased focus on MFT.  The first one I believe is the number of increasing compliance regulations.  You have things in the United States, for example, like HIPAA which is very strict privacy concerns over patient data, you have Sarbanes-Oxley which is in the financial area and very strict controls over financial reporting.  And then the European side you’ve got things such as Basel II which are specific rules for covering managed file transfers among other things, and then the European Union Data Protection Directive which deals with the protection of personal information.  There are many other instances as well and I believe Rohit is going to provide a little bit more information on this in his part of the remarks.

And the second key driver I believe is the high visibility security failures that we’ve all heard about in the past couple of years.  We’ve heard about frequent reports of compromised customer account information, compromised employee private information related to social security and other sensitive data.  And we’ve also all heard, even most recently as today, about the increasing repercussions related to the Wiki Leaks exposure of sensitive government information.  All of these things have come together, all of these lapse that have significantly increased the awareness of related risk on the part of CEOs and just as importantly on the part of auditors, both internal and external.  This is driving increased focus and increased visibility of the file transfer area and we believe that the risks related to file transfers will continue to rise and continue to increase.  This will result in more demand for better controls over file transfers and that is one of the key capabilities of MFT solutions so there does seem to be a good solution here”……

Read the full transcript and learn:

1. Findings from a recent survey of 300 senior IT Manager and what’s driving their need for MFT
2. What to look for in an MFT solution
3. Future of the MFT market