Axway MFT: A product roadmap for 2024

I started my MFT roadmap presentation at Axway’s North America Summit with a rather bold statement: Axway MFT is the most secure and reliable way to integrate file data. We are the category standard.

But we truly feel it’s our reality as a market leader, because of our heritage and what we have created over the past 20+ years. MFT is core to our DNA at Axway; it was the first pattern that we started to evolve many, many years ago before Axway was even formed.

Since then, we've touched every single market segment to learn what we know today, giving us the pedigree to boldly state our position in the market because we are tested in this market space.

In 2024, our roadmap continues to be driven by what our customers experience and need. We plan to continue accompanying them in securely sharing file transfers around the world through three main areas of focus: cloud modernization, security and compliance, and cloud security specifically.

Here is a look at the main drivers behind these three areas of focus, as well as an overview of how you can expect Axway MFT to evolve to continue supporting them through their operational imperatives in 2024 and beyond.

Cloud modernization requires ongoing expert support

It may seem a bit odd to talk about cloud modernization in 2024. It’s a given by now, right? But for MFT, this is a substantial shift: you don't move the plumbing in a house overnight, and that's what MFT is.

MFT is the foundation of all the pipes of data transfer that have been inside enterprises for decades, and to disrupt that and modernize by leveraging cloud technology is no small task.

At the same time, in 2024, businesses see cloud migration not just as a cost-saving measure but as a crucial catalyst for innovation, agility, and success across industries.

It's not just about lifting and shifting your MFT to the cloud. It's about using this opportunity to modernize and clean up your integrations. We see this significant focus in our customer base in the following ways:

• Organizational disruption, with cloud-enthusiastic leadership changes at the most senior levels
• Aggressive cloud initiatives with timelines that require monumental change and disruption in 2-4 years – these are accompanied by many cloud feature requests.
• Re-skilling, requiring heavy investment in upskilling team to support cloud tech
• New competition from cloud native hyperscalers that are being considered as a viable replacement

Finally, we’ve now reached a tipping point, as our colleagues in B2B integration have also noted, where cloud spend is starting to outgrow traditional, non-cloud spend and we’re in a trajectory that’s expected to grow aggressively in the next couple of years.

Here are some of the drivers and benefits to cloud adoption that are helping inform Axway MFT’s progression over the next several years.

AI-as-a-Service. In the race to leverage AI, Cloud services offer a fast ramp – a very fast and very available playground for your teams to engage and innovate on. Most organizations are still trying to figure out what AI means, and we ourselves at Axway are trying to figure out what it means for us and how we can leverage it to not only help us internally, but also evolve our technologies and solutions.

Hybrid and multi-cloud. 4 out of 5 companies today use multiple IaaS or PaaS providers, making hybrid cloud a standard necessity. I think in most large enterprises, nobody wants to get married to one vendor, so being able to operate within multi-cloud scenarios is becoming the normal architectural pattern – especially with considerations like SecNumCloud or sovereign cloud in specific regions.

Better confidence in cloud security and resiliency. All providers have invested heavily to build better security and resiliency capabilities to win more confidence and trust. Especially with evolutions around quantum safe cloud computing coming into effect in 2024, it's becoming more and more viable for enterprises to consider the public cloud as a place that they could leverage and use safely with their data.

Increased adoption and benefits of serverless computing. I believe it's still in its very early stages for our space, but it is coming up in more and more conversations. Serverless computing helps reduce the burden in managing infrastructure, which is significant.

Sustainable Cloud Computing. Finally, most companies are trying to meet CSR goals, and using the cloud is becoming “greener.” There have been great improvements by providers around net zero commitments, and enterprises can better leverage the cloud to meet their sustainability goals today.

Achieving rock-solid file transfer security and compliance

It’s estimated that 75% of the global population’s personal data will be covered under some sort of privacy regulation in 2024. Enhanced privacy and security requirements are already here, and they will continue to evolve.

Just in Europe, we’re seeing a lot of evolving regulations, and the US is considering its own version of GDPR, which was unveiled just this month. (Learn more about how the draft legislation, known as the American Privacy Rights Act (APRA), aims to harmonize the patchwork of existing U.S. privacy laws.)

When we're dealing with PII data, these regulations are going to be very stringent. For enterprises to react fast, vendors like Axway need to make sure we have solutions that meet these requirements more readily.

You’ve heard plenty about the rash of ransomware attacks and unprecedented compromises of MFT solutions in the past 24 months, and there’s no question this is forcing an aggressive focus to strengthen MFT security postures.

This crisis has put into stark relief just how important MFT is to the functioning of organizations, enterprises, and governments around the world.

Axway sets a very high bar when it comes to our security posture – we cover every tenant of security, from compliance to expertise and transparency, as well as a multifaceted Axway Security Program. I won’t delve into this too much, as you can read more about our security posture in my statement here: Ensuring your data stays protected from cybercriminals targeting MFT vendors.

I’ll just briefly highlight two of our ongoing security initiatives:

Zero Trust. We started looking at what Zero Trust means for our technology set last year, and we're continuously making progress there. This year, we look forward to sharing some POCs to showcase with our customers how you can leverage Zero Trust models in how you deploy and run your MFT services.

Raising the bar for ourselves. Last year, we made a goal to raise our security bar, which was already very high, because we feel it’s important to constantly challenge ourselves and never lose our strict security focus or the trust you have in us and our solutions. 2024 MFT product line priorities and delivery plan

A lot of our bigger investments over the last three to four years are now coming due, and we're very excited to be able to bring these to market now. Our teams have made colossal investments of time, energy, and research to make sure we bring you something that not only meets your expectations, but is also consumable at the right rate.

Here is some of what you can expect to see this year – or are already seeing!

Zero downtime architecture. Simply put, we need you to update sooner. Every release includes important security updates, and your ability to consume them without disruption is very important, so we’re thrilled to be able to give you a more efficient way to do that, without having to spend a significant amount on infrastructure.

Evolution of standard cluster. Evolving some of our architectures for more efficient delivery helps us deliver more to you, sooner.

Cloud edition. We're excited about our new containerized architecture for SecureTransport and look forward to sharing more on this.

Usage, entitlement, and telemetry. These features help ensure that you have a better experience as you understand how you're using the product better. But it also helps us learn from that, so we know how to better sustain and enhance the products we deliver.

MFT IQ, CX, UX

Customer-biased product evolutions. I’ve already touched on this, but we are in a very mature technology group, so making sure we're bringing evolutions that matter to you is very important in how we build our roadmap. Expect more of this going forward.

Continued security & compliance commitment. Again, I’ve already mentioned this, but I would add that I'm very proud of the team because we are ahead of that curve. The team has done a great job of uplifting our security posture within the products over the last couple of years.

Finally, evolving technology partnerships are helping us start to build the foundations of what we will bring in 2025 and will be a big part of what we deliver this year.

As a result of these areas of focus, here’s a glimpse at key product deliveries in 2024.

Toward more automated, intelligent MFT in 2025 and beyond

The question of “what’s next” is best answered by looking at an MFT maturity model.

Today, we feel Axway is the hybrid and multi-cloud vendor of choice.

We manage trillions of dollars’ worth of workloads and file transfers and enable businesses to do complex pattern integration at extreme scale. We have a SaaS offering that we manage as a vendor and successfully maintain and run many customers in production today.

So where do we want to go next? We aim to ultimately deliver automated, intelligent MFT.

How do we leverage AI to help flow design or support intelligent automation? With reliability being a key tenant of what MFT does, how do we leverage the technology evolutions of tomorrow so that we can make sure these systems are self-healing, self-scaling, and self-serving?

We still have to answer the age-old question, “where is my file?” for most of our customers, and with AI assistance today there are many new and exciting ways to create better experiences to serve your end users or customers. The POC’s we have done are already showing positive signs, and we will continue to innovate and collaborate with our customers to bring new features and capabilities to market.  

Continuous access and authorization links back to security and the Zero Trust posture we really need to consider in how we do businesses.  Being able to meet your compliance and security needs in an ever-evolving ecosystem is hard, but it is necessary to do business, so making this easier needs to be a priority.

And finally, APIs have been in our space for a long time, the next phase is how we can leverage these APIs and integrate them into an experience that your business can consume in a more autonomous way.

And we've already started some of that journey, whether it's leveraging the Marketplace to be able to evolve your API usage and consumption, or using an Application-as-a-Service platform to build customizable experiences for your end users. All of this is becoming very important to how MFT becomes more consumable. 

Finally, the topic of artificial intelligence has been unavoidable this year, and I feel it’s important to address some of the ways we’re looking at AI for MFT. I see many enhancements to productivity and automation – from developers to business users, as well as for efficiency and enhanced security & resiliency.

But that is a topic for another day, and I will dive deeper into how AI can enhance MFT operations in a future blog.

Whether it is leveraging new AI technologies or operationalizing the fruit of extensive R&D efforts, we look forward to delivering a best-in-class MFT solution to our customers this year. Strengthened by a rich history of supporting file transfers around the world, we’re ready to help enterprises meet current and future demands for security, compliance, cloud readiness, modernization, and more, together.

What MFT challenges are you grappling with in 2024? Let's find you the right solution.