What makes Diplomat MFT better than using a roll-your-own managed file transfer solution, or the stuff that AWS provides? This is something we get asked regularly. It’s a fair and important question.
When Coviant Software talks with organizations weighing their options in managed file transfer, they aren’t concerned about the typical slate of (complex, bloated, expensive) legacy MFT offerings, driven by private equity interests demanding high profit margins. Instead, they are considering cobbling together some combination of consumer-grade file sharing, cloud storage, and scripts written by someone on the team. The logic seems to be that file sharing and managed file transfer are pretty much the same thing. Why pay their prices when we can build something ourselves?
Increased Risk at Scale
We explain that the DIY approach doesn’t scale, isn’t easy to use, doesn’t do all the things a true managed file transfer platform can, and are a bear to maintain and expand. And what happens when someone else has to use your home-grown solution? The chances of a mistake—perhaps a costly or embarrassing one if you’re working with sensitive files—go up dramatically.
A lot of people picture their scripted solutions cobbled together from AWS components like the serene swan on a glassy smooth lake—forgetting the frenzied paddling happening under the surface. And as soon as there’s a failure like a transfer that is unaccounted for, a missed alert, an unknown bug, if there’s a security issue, or if there is a need for a capability that wasn’t considered when the home-grown solution was made, the expenses skyrocket and the benefits nosedive. When that happens, it’s all on you, because it was your call.
Simplicity, Reliability, ROI
Even if you have all the tools, infrastructure, and know-how, roll-your-own is rarely a winning proposition. That’s the beauty of Diplomat MFT, a mature, commercially supported, turnkey solution that can be implemented quickly and easily with a shallow learning curve. Diplomat MFT’s simplicity and reliability prevents the kind of heartburn and panic associated with failure reports, and at a value that significantly shortens the time to ROI.
(As an aside, why is ROI often regarded as a binary value? The thinking goes, “If a commercial product costs X and we can build our own for a fraction of X, we’ll do it ourselves.” That ignores the hours someone will spend doing tasks that could be automated, not to mention the costs associated with a data breach should something go awry. Scope creep is costly. And even when everything works as intended, costs ramp-up straight past the price of Diplomat MFT.)
That is where the 17 years of continuous improvement baked into Diplomat MFT makes sense. Our team has many decades of combined experience and expertise in managed file transfer alone. That’s a lot of time designing and delivering a product with all the things the DIYers have yet to figure out on their own; things like retries, powerful and flexible name and date matching, renaming, auditing, alerting, reporting, error recovery and avoidance… and that’s just getting started.
The Comfort of Diplomat MFT
Those are the kinds of details that Diplomat MFT customers can take comfort in knowing are going to be available and reliable when needed. In fact, Diplomat MFT handles mission critical transactions so well, and for so long, some admins forget which server it’s on. When the costs and frustrations of your roll-your-own solution start adding up, the organization that invested in Diplomat MFT are doing things that are more productive and profitable.
Before embarking on a managed file transfer construction project, remember that Diplomat MFT was already designed to solve the problems you’re facing. It slots smoothly and seamlessly into any infrastructure, it’s far less risky, and it does all of it at an astounding value—cheaper in the long run than what you were planning to build. If that sounds good to you, give us a call… or take Diplomat MFT out for a test drive and see for yourself how easy it is.
