Be secure with your data during FTP transactions.

Do you feel like you have little control over the FTP processes that transfer data amongst your various systems in your network? Are these events coordinated, or do they happen whenever someone decides to send data? Do your night operators send data to other servers as part of their duties? Have you ever missed a critical milestone in your night processing because data was late?

FTP is easy to do. FTP is very common. FTP does present problems from a security and operational standpoint. Is the data your staff is sending across the network safe? Are your nightly processing tasks tied into the processes of sending data? Deadlines are often missed because someone or some process forgot to send the data and down-level processes are adversely affected.

Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise recently was enhanced to include not only FTP, but also FTP Secure (FTPS) so that your file transmission can be sent through an FTPS server supporting the SSL application. It is just like using a secured HTTP server.

Robot/SCHEDULE jobs can now run your OS/400 command, Linux script, Windows BAT, or UNIX script in conjunction with sending data securely across your network. Figure 2 shows the setup for FTPS within a Robot/SCHEDULE job.

Figure 1: This example shows how your Robot/SCHEDULE command entry supports the FTP syntax as a command. (Click images to enlarge.)

The Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise implementation of FTPS accommodates your team with easy-to-administer, yet encrypted, passwords. This one place that your setup can be changed, and it affects any job in Robot/SCHEDULE that uses the FTP server. This will save your team an incredible amount of time. See Figure 2.

Figure 2: Establish the FTPS sign-on for ease of setup.

Just the other day, a customer commented to me, "There has to be a better way to automate these FTP processes." Yes, there is, and it is a standard feature in Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise.

Click here to learn more about Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise or to try it for 30 days. And check out Help/Systems' other offerings in the MC Showcase Buyer's Guide.

Tom Huntington is Executive Vice President of Technical Solutions at HelpSystems, and has been with the company for nearly 30 years. He works with business alliances, acquisitions and large customer relationships and ensures that the HelpSystems software works with other major software and hardware vendors worldwide.

Tom often speaks on enterprise scheduling, security, automation topics, IBM i technology, and the HelpSystems products, and hosts technical presentations on a variety of automation topics. He is the author of the HelpSystems IBM i Marketplace Survey and has written articles on automated operations, security, cloud computing, and business intelligence for leading trade journals and newsletters. He was named an IBM Champion in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 for over three decades of advocation and thought leadership on the IBM i platform.

Contact Tom at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..