GoAnywhere MFT Reviews

We use GoAnywhere MFT for both front-end SFTP and back-end managed file transfer.

We do not make use of the connectors for services like Salesforce, SharePoint Online, Dynamics 365, or any other services. The range of connectors that GoAnywhere MFT provides out of the box includes interesting connectivity to ServiceNow, which, although we don't use at our organization, adds flexibility, highlighting the product's strength in customization and configuration.

We do not use GoAnywhere agents because all of our connections are external organizations, and agents are more suitable for connecting offices within an organization.

We use secure forms for different purposes: one is for archiving data for 7 years for legal purposes, allowing employees to request specific files, and another allows us to handle all of our SFTP user and user-group provisioning through a secure form processing our formatted spreadsheet.

We use the GoFast feature to accelerate data transmission. This acceleration is beneficial as we handle a high volume of data and some fairly large files, sometimes up to 30 gig for an individual file, so having that functionality improves performance.

The best features of GoAnywhere MFT are its powerful customization capabilities that allow us to dictate the process and add in custom processes, which was a limitation with other MFTs we used.

Since implementing GoAnywhere MFT, we have seen scalability improvements, especially since we were using MOVEit MFT prior to that, and it just doesn't have the same scalability, making GoAnywhere a better fit as our company continued to grow.

The areas for improvement with GoAnywhere MFT include a basic SFTP user interface that lacks functionality compared to other MFT SFTP solutions, as well as some administrative features like filtering a page and job log record retention that could be enhanced. Support, UI, and filtering can definitely improve.

I have been using this solution for about 4 years.

The overall deployment of GoAnywhere MFT was pretty complex. It was complex due to the importance of data security in our industry, requiring a lot of infrastructure setup and a learning curve while migrating from the old environment.

The solution requires maintenance from our end, which includes applying patches and updates, as well as testing and validating new versions. Judging stability in terms of downtime, bugs, and glitches, I would rate GoAnywhere MFT as an eight out of ten.

GoAnywhere MFT meets our business needs in scalability, answering our capacity requirements. I would rate the scalability of GoAnywhere MFT as a ten.

When it comes to technical support, I would give it a rating of three. The technical support is slow to respond and to take action when issues arise, along with difficult-to-use user forums which complicate finding solutions on our own.

Neutral

We were using MOVEit MFT prior to implementing GoAnywhere MFT. We have seen scalability improvements since the switch, as MOVEit MFT didn't have the same scalability, making GoAnywhere MFT a better fit as our company continued to grow.

The initial deployment took several months.

From our end, six people were involved in the deployment. Currently, ten users work with GoAnywhere MFT.

I have seen a return on investment from GoAnywhere MFT, not just financially, but also in saved time, resources, and efficiencies. In terms of percentage, for the amount of volume we are doing with GoAnywhere MFT and its functionality, I would estimate it has provided about a 50% return in four years.

Regarding the pricing of GoAnywhere MFT, they recently changed their pricing model, which wasn't as favorable, now moving to an annual renewal subscription model, but compared to other MFTs, I still find it reasonable. If I were to rate GoAnywhere MFT on a scale from 1 to 10, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I would say it falls around a six.

When comparing GoAnywhere MFT with other MFT products, I think it's a good fit for an enterprise-level organization, though it may be more complex than needed for small-medium businesses.

Our relationship with Fortra is that we are customers. GoAnywhere MFT has not saved us significant time in securely connecting with third parties; it compares well with other MFTs, though it hasn't been difficult to use. I would recommend GoAnywhere MFT to other users if they need something very scalable and flexible. On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution a 7.

We primarily use GoAnywhere MFT to facilitate secure file transfers via SFTP and HTTP protocols. Our most important usecase is for the files uploaded for any support cases created by customer. Customers can upload/download files for their respective cases either via SFTP or HTTP. Project workflows has been great to buid automation for this usecase. We have an integration of GoAnywhere MFT internally with Oracle Service Cloud and the automation plays a vital role for to and from communication between these systems.

GoAnywhere MFT has significantly improved our operational efficiency by enabling the automation of complex file transfer tasks through its project workflow feature. These workflows allow us to design, schedule, and execute multi-step processes.As a result, we’ve reduced errors, saved time. Since, the project workflows can be created with low code no code it significantly simplified the process of building and testing new workflows. As a result our development cycles are shorter and we are able to add more value.

The project-based workflow automation feature elevates the GoAnywhere MFT beyond a simple file transfer solution. We leverage its schedule-driven execution and robust integration capabilities to automate and streamline our business processes. Since we have an automation that integrates with our internal systems REST/SOAP API calls via GoAnywhere has been really helpful. Along with this, the triggers for file transfer has helped us to sync files to other downstreams systems needing the information.

While GoAnywhere MFT is robust and reliable, its user interface could benefit from a more modern and intuitive design.

We have been using GoAnywhere MFT for more than 3 years for one of our use cases. 

It's stable. I would rate GoAnywhere MFT a ten out of ten in terms of stability.

Its architecture supports clustering and load balancing, which enables horizontal scaling for heavy workload requirements.

Our experience with GoAnywhere’s support has been positive overall. While support interactions have generally been smooth, occasional wait times during peak periods may occur.

Positive

The initial setup of GoAnywhere MFT was straightforward, thanks to its user-friendly web-based interface and comprehensive documentation. We were able to setup our env with clustering enabled within a day.

Automation of manual file transfers and workflows reduced the time we had to spend on repetitive tasks which resulted in fewer errors and less troubleshooting.

Its a cost-effective solution.

Take advantage of GoAnywhere’s extensive connectors to integrate with existing systems. It can save time and reduce complexity

We have been using GoAnywhere MFT for transferring files and connecting to different platforms for data exchange.

The system is user-friendly and has significantly helped us meet our goals, particularly in file transfer. It eliminates human errors and has improved our workflow overall. Additionally, it has increased the speed at which work is processed and transferred.

The connectors work seamlessly. I don't have any complaints about the connectors.

My favorite feature is team collaboration, whereby a team can do personal-to-personal file transfers. I appreciate how files are being transferred. Before a file is shared with anyone, there is a scanning process that takes place, and the file is securely shared without any problem or malware existing in the file. After deploying the GoAnywhere MFT solution, we saw its benefits immediately.

What I love about this system, from the administrator's perspective, is that we can view who has logged in, the time of their login, and their location. This feature provides valuable insight into tracking and understanding who is using the system at any given time.

The area where I would suggest improvement is on the pricing side. The pricing is not favorable sometimes when we use it for a few people. Even if we purchase additional licenses, no discount is given. If we are adding a license on the system, they should look at that and frame an affordable price for everyone, whereby everyone can access these prices effectively. This would give a view and a clue on how the system could run better on our side.

I have been using GoAnywhere MFT for almost one and a half years.

It's stable. I have not seen any issues.

It is scalable. We have 11 users using GoAnywhere MFT. 

I have contacted the technical support. The part which is quick is the sales team. The sales team responds quickly compared to any part of the specialization on the system. I appreciate how fast they act. The support deserves an eight out of ten.

Positive

For file transfer, we have been using a tool called Folgo, which is embedded in Google Drive, and it has supported us in transferring bulky files.

The deployment of GoAnywhere MFT was easy because we deployed the system on cloud. It took us around a period of 3 days because we had to talk to the expert of GoAnywhere MFT before we negotiated. As we were talking to the expert, the deployment started and we had to go step-by-step.

In terms of maintenance, it requires updates. Sometimes it slows down and requires updates.

Only one person is required for this type of deployment.

The pricing is not favorable when we use it for a few people.

Overall, I would rate GoAnywhere MFT an eight out of ten.

My use case involves transferring databases into AWS using GoAnywhere MFT, which provides encryption and collaboration with other teammates to see the process and transfer files and related data.

The documentation provided is sufficient to understand and integrate the solution. 

The GoAnywhere MFT agents are deployed locally, and they provide a browser-based interface that makes it easy to configure and schedule file transfers, which is beneficial for automation and workflow management. 

Over time, we discovered that the scheduling feature and integration aspects work very effectively. 

It has saved considerable time because we didn't need to write extensive custom code to integrate it. Most features were drag and drop, and with its browser-based software interface, it proved to be excellent overall and saved us significant time.

We have used the security features only once or twice, but the security it provides is excellent. The GoFast feature is being used by our tech teams, and they found it very fast and efficient while transferring files and data related to code. It reduces the need for custom code significantly. The VMware virtual environment was capable of connecting with the virtual servers.

The encryption feature is very impressive in GoAnywhere MFT, and the encryption provided by the company is much stronger than other file transferring software. The automation feature allows teammates to see and schedule file transfers, and the API integration capabilities are amazing features. 

A drawback is that it is not as feature-rich compared to its competitor Sterling, which we used before. It has fewer features, though it is more intuitive. This was the compromise we had to make during the transition. 

I have been using GoAnywhere MFT for 1 year.

It was very stable compared to other solutions we have used, so I would not complain regarding this.

It is highly scalable as the data we had before compared to now has changed significantly during this time. With the scaling of the company, it was absolutely capable of handling all the data and databases.

We have contacted them for issues and bugs. They have their number on their website to call, and they are fast and available all the time. With the live chat feature on the website, they are available almost every time, which is great.

Positive

The features we had in Sterling were more, but compared to Sterling, GoAnywhere MFT is more intuitive and our teammates can easily understand it. We don't need to explain and train people to learn about it, as they can read documentation and easily adapt to it, making GoAnywhere MFT better.

The deployment was very easy as the documentation was provided and they had trial packages. Their team helps with the demo, making it easy to deploy with the VMware environment. For fully setting it up and integrating with our database, it took 3 to 4 days.

There were three people involved in the implementation.

It has saved a lot of time because we didn't need to write extensive custom code to integrate it.

The pricing is decent for mid-sized and small-sized companies. It is good for startups or mid-scale companies.

I would advise trying the demo and trials according to your company's needs. You should compare and correlate your experiences. It's important to do a trial and consider the amount of data in your company. 

I would also recommend reading their documentation and exploring the resources section on their website, where you can watch tutorials, product videos, and guides. 

I would rate GoAnywhere MFT an eight out of ten.

I am a pre-sales consultant for my organization, distributing Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT software and services across India.

We have completed 25 implementations, with 20 on-premises and five cloud-based.

Some of our clients make use of GoAnywhere MFT's connectors.

Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT is our primary product, distributed to most of our clients. Our dedicated GoAnywhere team has been deploying and providing Level One and Level Two support for the product for many years. Since 2017, we have distributed GoAnywhere to numerous clients in India who consistently renew their subscriptions. While they may evaluate other products, they ultimately return to GoAnywhere due to its compliance features, automation capabilities, workflows, and security measures.

One of our clients has implemented GoAnywhere MFT's Secure Forms for initial registration. This solution enhances user and server security while allowing end-users to self-register.

One of our clients uses the GoFast feature to transfer large files.

GoAnywhere MFT facilitates efficient connectivity with third parties, provided the firewall policies are open.

Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT offers robust security as its most valuable feature. It provides multiple cipher options for HTTPS and SFTP protocols, utilizing AES-based algorithms for secure communication and data transfer. As a testament to its security capabilities, GoAnywhere was recognized as a leading product by Gartner in 2023. GoAnywhere is a compliance-driven solution that adheres to various standards, including HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS, ensuring our company meets all necessary regulations. Furthermore, it offers robust automation capabilities, enabling us to customize and automate file transfers and replacements, streamlining workflows through scheduling and monitoring features. Our organization and our valued customers extensively utilize these key functionalities.

The technical support response time has room for improvement.

I have been using Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT for six months.

I would rate the stability of Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT eight out of ten.

Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT is highly scalable. We have clients with over 600,000 users.

While the technical support team is knowledgeable, their response time for critical issues needs improvement. A response within one business day is insufficient for urgent matters.

Neutral

We have worked with other Managed File Transfer solutions like IP Switch, but GoAnywhere offers a single dashboard for all features. While IP Switch requires two different solutions to manage MFT, GoAnywhere provides a single dashboard to manage automated and manual file transfers.

The deployment is straightforward and takes roughly two days to complete.

We implement GoAnywhere MFT for our customers.

Return on investment is evident in the reduction of resource utilization. This workflow automation solution has enabled three customers to reduce their workforce by automating tasks previously performed by employees. For example, GoAnywhere can perform the work of three people, leading to a decrease in manpower needs for automation and file transfer. Additionally, GoAnywhere enhances security and helps customers achieve compliance by automating the file transfer process, eliminating the need for manual file transfers and ensuring secure delivery to the destination.

Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT pricing is competitive.

I would rate Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT ten out of ten.

We have six people working with GoAnywhere MFT. Our customers range from small to enterprises.

GoAnywhere MFT requires ongoing maintenance to ensure optimal performance and security. Regular updates, including patches and upgrades, are released approximately every three months to address vulnerabilities and introduce new features. Keeping the system up-to-date is essential for its continued functionality and protection against potential threats.

As a technical professional, I recommend Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT due to its comprehensive feature set and unified dashboard, which streamline functionalities that often require multiple tools in other, more costly MFT solutions.

We primarily used GoAnywhere MFT to transfer files. Our organization had third-party source vendors who needed to submit files that had to get to us or our third-party end vendors securely. Files were fairly large in size, and we needed to track who was delivering the files and when, whether it was the right type of file, and whether it was delivered to the vendor partner at the right time.

We also wanted to run it through a project management tool. The automated processes, which I think were called project workflows, allowed us to do this a lot more seamlessly than we were able to do before.

I am very happy with the usage that we had when I was managing it. I am a fan of the product. It helped save me a lot of time and a lot of headaches.

It took us a little bit of time to get it up and running. It was not a whole lot of time compared to other tools. We had it up and running in no time, and we were able to implement an advanced solution. We had SecureMail working for years and had people logging in. It took us about a week to figure things out and get support from GoAnywhere on how to use that. It took about a month to two months to solidify the MVP use case, get that tested with the end users, and then get it up and running. We were also able to tweak it. After about six months of that tool being in use, we got feedback from our end vendors who were using the tool on both sides of the house. They were able to change the way the teams worked because they did not need to train everyone on how to use the tool. With this drag-and-drop interface that we had set up for them using GoAnywhere's MFT, each process was given a folder, so they just dragged files into the folder, and then from there, the backend handled all of it and moved it over to where it was supposed to go securely. They were able to change the way their teams worked internally. That was a benefit for us. Having efficiency for our partners is not something that necessarily saved us money, but it certainly created a much better working relationship with our partners. They were much happier with that.

The other benefit was time savings because of the simplicity of the tool. Now we have people logging into a complex interface, going in, checking a bunch of dots or a bunch of fields, and filling in some values as they upload each file. With the automation that we had with the process workflows, that was all handled in the backend. We have now got a little bit longer lead time and that is why we are looking at going back and getting this GoAnywhere MFT again because it saved us so much headache.

GoAnywhere MFT saved us time in connecting securely with the third parties we needed to collaborate with. Some of the files that we send are time-sensitive and restricted. We cannot share them with anyone who does not have an NDA with us. It was very important that these files were sent securely and quickly from our source vendors to us so that we could review them and send them over to our end vendors to be delivered to our stores. Having GoAnywhere MFT allowed us to change the way that we did our work.

I was looking into the Box, Salesforce, and SharePoint connectors, but we found that, although the price point was not bad, it was just a lot more than what we needed. We could do most of the capabilities that we wanted with the default API through Box or SharePoint. There was a lot of capability, but we thought that if we were going to use these, we better be doing a whole lot more with it than just the basic simple use case that we had. We were not going to use all the capabilities, so we decided to not use that. We did wind up needing some of the reporting capabilities that GoAnywhere has out of the box. Its advanced reporting made our IT department feel a lot more comfortable about the usage of a tool that had a front-facing website.

When we first started using it, SecureMail, or the ability to securely send mail to end users, as a single file or as a package of files, was very helpful for sending large packets of files. We could not send that through traditional email. 

It also allowed us to know that the file would expire after a certain amount of time. We could limit the number of downloads. That stopped us from having to worry about whether it had been routed to everyone in the organization. It helped to ensure that it was sent to who it was supposed to be sent to and is no longer available. That was why we had selected GoAnywhere a long time ago, and then the ability to tie it in via APIs and do low-code implementations allowed us to supercharge that.

While I was happy with the training and support, more of it could be beneficial. We had some basic training and support. I talked with Fortra recently, and they said that they revamped and changed their training support. I have not used it since December. I got support in February and May of last year, and it was not bad. I was just not sure which questions to ask. Trying to learn this stuff on the fly as you are handed a project is always stressful.

I like that you can tweak the interface so much, but it would be nice to be able to tweak it some more. The ability to further tweak the interface would be advantageous, as our end users had some questions about modifications that we could not address. Other than that, GoAnywhere seemed to fulfill its role as a simple solution for secure file transfer.

My organization started using it in about 2012, but I started using it in 2017. Unfortunately, we stopped using it in December 2023. We had been looking at different products that we could remove from our product line. We have a lot of different tools that we use. 

GoAnywhere was selected as one of those that we would not use. However, I am currently looking at using GoAnywhere again because removing it has caused a lot of internal problems. We are currently looking at using GoAnywhere or similar tools.

I was very happy with their tech support. Whenever I called or emailed, they responded quickly. For emergencies, they made themselves available to assist promptly.

When we had issues, they moved forward quickly within a couple of days. When we had an emergency, they would make themselves available to handle that. When our service went down because we were transferring over, they were on board for a full five days. They were there and available. I was very impressed by their ability to provide tech support for something that was a very critical system for us.

They were one of our top vendor partners. I would rate them a nine out of ten. I was very impressed, and I expected more of my other vendors because of the quality of support that I got from Fortra.

Positive

They are not similar, but we tried using SharePoint and Adobe products to perform similar operations of sending files securely. However, these alternatives were complex and not user-friendly. They could do the basic operations of sending files and securely allowing us to share files with our vendors, but it just got complicated. There were too many widgets and too much going on, so we had to train our end users on what to do and how to do it right every single time.

Our users found it easier to use a dedicated tool like GoAnywhere, which had simpler and restricted access controls. With GoAnywhere, the users would log in, and they had files, and those were the only folders they had access to. The access was set by the administrator. It was very clear what they should be using that tool for. When it came to SharePoint, the users had restricted files for a specific purpose, but they also had a whole lot of other files for other reasons, so they would often get lost. It was nice to have a dedicated tool different from other tools that the users were using.

We deployed it three times. Prior to me, it was deployed on a Linux box. We redeployed it to another Linux box, and I was part of that, and then we redeployed it to an Azure machine. I wish that we had more resources and more technical support on our end.

The GoAnywhere team was fantastic in helping us. I am not a technical guy, but I was able to figure it out. The documentation was pretty clear, and for anything that I did not get, I could get on the phone with them. I was pretty happy with how you take the package and install the package and it just runs on your server. It was pretty straightforward. The hard part was working with our IT to make sure that we were doing everything securely on our end. You could have a lockbox, but if you have the key sitting outside, what good is that? Getting it set up so that it was a fully secure system from the moment users accessed it to the moment the users got the NAND file was critical. All the problems that we had or the challenges that we had were related to setting up the cloud machine and working with Azure to get it working, not so much with GoAnywhere's platform.

We were setting up a brand new virtual machine on the Azure environment, so we needed people who could handle the infrastructure as a service capability. That is a whole team at our company. We also had to make sure that the entire thing was set up securely. We have a whole security department that handles that and makes sure that we are setting ourselves up with the right WAF, that it is HTTPS, and that it has a security certificate. 

I managed to handle the installation of the software myself. I also set it up and got it configured. I did that myself with support from other people on my team to make sure that I was dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Getting someone else to look at what you are doing is always good quality control. For the most part, it was just me and one other person.

If anyone feels that the price for this product is too high, I would like to know what else they are using. When it comes to secure systems that we have used, the price point can get a whole lot higher. You might end up saving in the short term with other solutions, but are you getting a secure product? Do you feel confident in that? Will you be able to get any support afterward? From my experience, based on the price point and the service that we got, it was a good value for our money. Other people may have different requirements, but it met and exceeded the security requirements for our use case. I would recommend considering the product, what you are spending, and whether you are getting support for that.

We considered using their agents, but we found that a front-facing website was a lot easier for our users to use and for us to implement. We did not have extremely capable IT people to go and install the agents and make sure that we were installing the right version and keeping that up to date on our end users. Having our users guided over to a website that we could then maintain was a lot easier for us to manage. We are not talking about thousands of users. We are talking about about 60 users in total who we were connecting to the tool.

We looked into SecureForms for our end users. It was an additional data entry. For the most part, for our particular use case, these final ART files already had all the metadata that we needed inside of another tool. It was just about getting these files that were identified by a unique identifier from the artist over to our end users. Everything that we needed to know was contained within the user who was logging in and could be referenced by the unique identifier, so we did not want to busy the process with SecureForms. There might be other use cases where SecureForms could be helpful, and we have dabbled with it, but to get our particular use case out the door, we did not need SecureForms.

I would rate Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT a ten out of ten. I was very impressed by the tool, its capability, and the way their support responded. I would absolutely recommend it. I am an advocate for this product. I am biased because it saved me time and frustration.

I would definitely use the product again. I am advocating for it right now. We have spent considerably more than what we have spent in our entire infrastructure trying to find other solutions, but we have not found any. I would definitely go back to it.

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.

Positive

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.

We primarily use GoAnywhere MFT to securely transfer our files and encrypt files and other data points that we have. We transfer it across cloud storage platforms, which is our main use case with this software.

We also build workflows which can be easily configured. There is a scheduler feature inside the GoAnywhere MFT platform which automatically helps us run these workflows and basically helps us get our reports securely on time through cloud.

The scheduler feature in GoAnywhere MFT is something that I appreciate very much because we primarily deal with large data sets.

Our file transfer that we do is quite large and we require a daily check-in and monitoring data that comes to our email. The scheduler automatically encrypts the data and sends it to the corresponding email IDs or the corresponding cloud platforms automatically without any manual intervention.

This saves a lot of time for us and ensures we get our data on time.

Feature-wise, I don't think there's any negative aspect about GoAnywhere MFT; it's very much packed, very good and ready to go.

One area where they can improve is that many training documents are missing. Initially, when I started using the software, I found it a little hard to navigate and understand. More help documents and knowledge-based documents could have been much more useful. That could be developed, but apart from that, feature-wise, everything is great.

I have been using it for about a year to 14 months.

I have not seen any instability with GoAnywhere MFT; in fact, it's very good.

There's no lagging or ping issues. The data we usually transfer consists of large files, and it's quite smooth and clean. There's no lag.

Being a cloud solution, GoAnywhere MFT is very much scalable.

Currently, we have three locations where we use this, and we might expand it to five or six locations. Because it's a cloud platform and a stable platform, it is scalable.

The support team for GoAnywhere MFT is very knowledgeable. Any query that I have, they are very patient with me and they try to give me the reason behind the issue and then solve it.

They're pretty quick and responsive. It's not a situation where you raise a ticket and wait for 48 hours to get a response; it's immediate. Their knowledge level is something that I appreciate with the team.

Positive

I have not used any alternatives to GoAnywhere MFT personally.

Learning how to fully use GoAnywhere MFT took time for me personally; it took around four to six weeks to understand and learn the entire process and product.

That was time-consuming. Ideally, it should have been completed in a week or two at maximum. With products such as this, time is an important crucial factor. That was the only issue.

I would recommend contacting the GoAnywhere MFT support team earlier to understand the platform more quickly. I spent six weeks learning the system, but if I had reached the support team earlier, I might have understood it in two or three weeks.

I would recommend everyone to use this kind of managed file transfer software, if not GoAnywhere MFT, then something else, so that data remains safe and encrypted, especially considering the prevalence of data theft.

I would encourage them to use GoAnywhere MFT.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate this solution an 8.5.