Fortra makes software that moves files between companies on a schedule and says AI could give admins back up to 160 hours a year. That’s 3.1 hours a week admins would otherwise spend figuring out why a transfer failed. 

Managed file transfer (MFT) sits behind payroll exports, bank settlements, and purchase orders. Fortra ships two MFT platforms, GoAnywhere MFT and Globalscape EFT. The new AI feature behind the estimate here is Guided Diagnostics, which works inside GoAnywhere. 

Heath Kath, Team Lead, Solutions Engineering at Fortra, is joining me for a demonstration on Thursday, November 19, at noon (9 a.m. Pacific). Kath will run Guided Diagnostics against a simulated failure and take questions on how the estimate was built. 

Kath tells The New Stack that most failed transfers he sees come down to a connection or login problem with an outside trading partner. The log usually shows one of four error types: authentication, network, permissions, or a missing file. He mostly works in GoAnywhere and said the pattern holds on Globalscape and other MFT platforms. 

He points to an example of a financial services company that sends a daily settlement file to a trading partner over SFTP, a secure way to move files between servers. And one day, the partner reports the file never arrived.

So the admin searches logs to find the right one, which shows an authentication failure. The admin then checks the SFTP connection settings and tests the password. When that doesn’t work, the admin asks the partner to inspect its own server logs.

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