Why Managed File Transfer (MFT)?

To transfer files from one organization to another, we need a secure pathway.  Additionally, the files transferred must be monitored, reliable, consistent and secured. Rather than achieving the above from conventional file transfer solutions like FTP, we use the MFT.

IBM is one of the vendors of MFT in the market.  This feature can be incorporated at the time of installation of IBM MQ. To do this, we have to select the IBM MQ Managed File Transfer related features like server, client, agent and logger. As it is built on top of IBM MQ, we easily leverage features like reliable, secured and assured delivery.

To transfer a file from one organization to another organization with the help of IBM MQ MFT, we need the following components –

• Agents
• Agent Queue Managers
• Command Queue Manager
• Coordination Queue Manager
• Logger to see the status of the transfer

Now, we can either use a single QM for Agent QM, Command QM, Coordination QM or we can have individual QMs for each. The agents will then communicate with the respective Agent QM. These agents are responsible for transfer of files.In this framework, the Coordination Queue Manager is the QM whichwill be used to broadcast the audit and file transfer information. This QM has information about all the other agents. We can use the Command Queue Manager to issue the MFT commands.