Partner File Exchange in the Cloud
Give partners control with self-service portals
Reduce IT overhead when on-boarding and managing trading partner integrations.
Thru’s managed file transfer as a service (MFTaaS) can act as a file exchange gateway between your organization and trading partners. The principle of this design is to simply the onboarding of new partners and the management of endpoints and file routing as well as providing 100% visibility of all file transfer traffic.
How to Connect to Partners for File Exchange
Once Thru is deployed, your MFT administrator creates the trading partner organizations and file transfer flows. The organization entities become subscribers to the flows which can be self-managed by the trading partners. This offloads much of the administration associated with SFTP endpoints, such as key management and flow endpoint details such as folder path location for pick up or drop off.
File Transfer Flows
Each flow created by the organization is directional either to or from the trading partners. Multiple partners can subscribe to the same flow, reducing the number of connections the organization has to manage.
Note: If a subscriber of a flow is disabled or a flow endpoint is not connected, the flow still works for other endpoints or subscribers.
Flow Endpoints
Each flow can have many endpoints. The following protocols are supported: SFTP, FTPS and HTTPS.
Note: AS2 is not currently supported.
Self-Service
The trading partner can be given access to the MFT system by the administrator to configure its flow endpoints. This greatly reduces the overhead of the organization by handing over control to the trading partner.
Note: The organization can also control the flow endpoints without providing access to the trading partner.
Customer Success Story for Partner File Exchange
Blackwoods is an Australian industrial equipment supplier of tools, safety equipment, workwear, cleaning, hardware, electrical and site services. This 140-year-old company needed to upgrade its existing file transfer solution which was based on multiple SFTP servers being managed by its IT department. The key drivers for this project were around reducing IT overhead for managing the file transfers systems and a compliance requirement to improve data governance.
Diagram: Prior Solution Relies on On-Premises Servers
Diagram: In Thru Solution, Nothing Deployed On-Premises—100% Cloud and 100% Managed
Blackwoods selected Thru to address two primary use cases for transferring files into and out of the enterprise:
- Exchanging large image files with vendors.
- Processing banking transactions
File payments, EFT, payroll, tax, bank transfers and reconciliations need to be exchanged securely.
Using Thru deployed in our Sydney datacenter provides Blackwoods with the required data sovereignty. Additionally, moving to the cloud enables Blackwoods to exchange files with its banks and vendors without the need or management of any servers on-premises or in the DMZ.
Thru helps Blackwoods overcome its two most challenging file transfer use cases:
- To submit large image files for the Blackwoods catalog, vendors are subscribed to file transfer flows allowing them to manually upload over HTTPS or automatically upload via SFTP.
- Banking partners are also subscribed to file transfer flows that are connected to either SFTP servers or clients.
In both use cases, files are securely transferred in transit and at rest with all transfers recorded in audit for a central source for reporting. In the event of an exception, such as an endpoint not connecting, alerts are signaled.
