Acronis MassTransit
Easy, efficient and secure file transfer solution

Overview:

As digital file transfer achieves increasing importance and broader use within corporations, larger communities of users and sites must be configured and managed within the file transfer solution. With free / inexpensive FTP and other solutions, management and governance of this burgeoning community is becoming very painful. IT personnel must spend an increasing amount of time creating, configuring, modifying and otherwise managing accounts and settings for the large community of file transfer users. Further, due to the time consuming, manual and error prone nature of creating and configuring accounts in these solutions, users must consistently wait long periods of time for connections to be established with users and trading partners – which often prevents timely completion of business.

Additionally, user adoption is a key barrier to gaining the benefits of Managed File Transfer across enterprises. FTP and other solutions often make it difficult for users to understand and adopt digital file transfer as a method of doing business. Among other things, they often require substantial manual processes and do not make it easy for users to receive files sent to them. Further, it is not easy for users to “address deliveries” to other users, making it hard for them to get files to those to whom they need to send them. Customers seeking to gain the benefits of digital file transfer on a broad scale through FTP and similar solutions struggle to gain adoption due to these issues.

These challenges – poor ability to manage the community of users and difficulties in user adoption – cause customers to incur substantial costs – both in terms of lost IT and user productivity, as well as increased time-to-market and slow down of overall business processes. Worse yet, they can block the success of digital file transfer systems and prevent customers from achieving strategic business objectives and associated benefits. By making it easy to provision and manage users, and by making it easy for large communities to adopt and use managed file transfer, MassTransit HP ensures customers the fastest adoption of file transfer solutions across the enterprise and the fastest, most complete delivery of the business advantages offered by enterprise-wide Managed File Transfer deployments.

User Scenarios

Tens of thousands of users today are already benefiting from MassTransit:

• Enables business users to easily share mission-critical files of all sizes - from 5MB to 100GB - securely, reliably and easily.
• Eliminates wasted time resending information because of unreliable transfer technologies.
• Lets users share information at speeds they never thought possible - up to 20X faster than traditional FTP tools.
• Minimizes the risks of sending unsecured digital content between users or servers - meeting even the most demanding HIPAA, SOX, and GLBA compliance requirements.
• With more than a decade in the market, MassTransit was created from the ground up to handle file transfers as part of larger business processes.
• Automates the countless hours of valuable employee time not having to manually send files using FTP.
• Saves thousands of dollars a year in file shipping costs.
• Improves overall email performance and reduces email storage demands.

Why MassTransit

• MassTransit is today's fastest, most reliable and easy to use managed file transfer solution.
• With MassTransit's UDP performance option, you can send files up to 10X faster than traditional FTP protocols.
• MassTransit's end-to-end performance is superior because we eliminate the need to ZIP or UNZIP files before and after they are sent.
• MassTransit has the flexibility to quickly and easily send and receive files using virtually any of today's transfer protocols including: FTP, SFTP, HTTP, HTTPS, or our own industry-proven MTAP (MassTransit Advanced Protocol).
• MassTransit does not suffer from the same security or reliability issues that are inherent in traditional FTP-based products.
• MassTransit's user interface is intuitive and web-based - so usability is never an issue.

Features:

• Ease of use, accelerated user adoption, reliability, service provisioning.
• Rock solid architecture. Support for thousands of large files, users and sites.
• Extensive client platform support: Macintosh, Windows, Linux.
• Integration with corporate infrastructure like Active Directory.
• Mission critical performance and automation.
• Advanced transfer protocols for every need.

Basic MassTransit Active Directory Authentication

The cost and effort associated with governance and service provisioning for large numbers of users and applications is high. MassTransit helps to substantially reduce those costs by allowing system administrators to link file transfer user accounts to their Active Directory accounts, eliminating the need to maintain credentials, email addresses and other properties in a separate application.

There are many benefits provided by using Active Directory for authentication in MassTransit:

• Users don’t need to remember another password to use MassTransit to send and receive files.
• Administrators and application managers don’t need to maintain user names, passwords and email addresses in MassTransit.
• MassTransit inherits the company’s governance policies from Active Directory and can therefore enforce them. For example, password complexity rules and expiration are automatically extended to MassTransit.
• Passwords, Email Addresses and other user items are managed in Active Directory and when changed, the update is automatically reflected in MassTransit. For example, processes that depend on automatic email notification of file deliveries won’t need to be updated.
• When an account is disabled in Active Directory, it is also disabled in MassTransit (for instance, when an employee leaves the company).
• Users benefit from using Single Sign On. If a user is logged in to his / her computer with Active Directory credentials, they bypass the MassTransit login and can immediately send and receive files.

Automatic Account Provisioning and Maintenance: MassTransit Master Lists

MassTransit assists in lowering the cost of provisioning and account maintenance through its new Master List capabilities.

The MassTransit Master List (MML) is one or more Active Directory Security Groups containing users and other groups. It can be an existing group or a specially created group. The MassTransit HP Server will automatically create, delete and maintain Web Client accounts for users who are members of this group. Administrators can create a special “Profile” Web Client account that specifies the detailed security and other settings to be used when automatically provisioning a new account.

By making use of this powerful capability, administrators can completely automate the provisioning and maintenance of Web Client accounts for Active Directory-based users, eliminating the need to manage those accounts directly in MassTransit.

A few examples:

In its simplest form, if the organization wishes to allow all of its users to use MassTransit for digital file transfers, the MML could be pointed to the Active Directory “Users” group. MassTransit will automatically create and maintain Web Client accounts for everyone in the group. Those users will access MassTransit with their normal network credentials.

As another option, the organization may wish to enable access to file transfer services only for a certain community of users or groups. For instance a “File Transfer Users” group could be created, and existing users and groups like “Production”, “Editors”, “Sales” could be made members of it. As expected, when a new employee is hired as an editor, his / her account is created in Active Directory and added to the “Editors” group, a MassTransit account will be automatically created and file transfer services will be enabled for this new employee. When they are removed from the MML or from any group member of the MML, it is also removed from MassTransit.

In addition to the benefits provided by the basic Active Directory Authentication described above, the use of the MassTransit Master List significantly lowers administrative load and costs while facilitating provisioning and governance by eliminating the need to manually create and maintain user accounts to enable file transfer services in the MassTransit HP system.

Automatic Transfer Privilege Management: MassTransit Distribution Lists

MassTransit further assists in lowering the cost of provisioning and adds the ability to enforce corporate governance and security through its new Distribution List capabilities. The new MassTransit Distribution List (MDL) capability defines who can send files to whom. A user can send files to any other user who is a member of an MDL to which they belong. Users can be members of more than one MassTransit Distribution List.

MassTransit automatically takes care of the entire account management process, including dynamically adjusting transfer privileges, thus requiring no administrative intervention.

The MDL is a regular Active Directory Security Group containing users and other groups. It can be an existing group or a specially created group. By adding groups like “Production” and “Sales” to an MDL, members of each group can be enabled to exchange files with each other.

While MassTransit creates and maintains permanent accounts for members of the MassTransit Master Lists (MML) described previously, for members of the MDL MassTransit creates accounts on demand, only when they are needed, and makes these users available as valid destinations for files to be transferred. These on demand accounts are automatically purged after a period of time and are recreated when needed.

In addition to the benefits described in previous sections, the use of MassTransit Distribution Lists lowers governance and provisioning costs even more by eliminating the need to manually configure transfer privileges between users. Security is further enforced by dynamically propagating existing Active Directory security group membership changes to MassTransit.

Ad-hoc File Transfers and Active Email Links

The use of the capabilities described above combined with automatic email notification allow organizations to establish ad-hoc file delivery workflows without any need to manually create and maintain MassTransit Web Client accounts, while also providing a seamless, easy-to-use experience for end-users.

Requirements:

MassTransit HP server

• CPU: Intel or AMD processor. Minimum recommended speed is 2GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent. At least two cores or processors strongly recommended.
• Windows Server 2003 (SP2 or later, 32-bit or 64-bit), Windows Server 2008 (32-bit or 64-bit, including R2), or Windows Server 2012 (including R2)
• MySQL 5.0.78 required, MySQL 5.1 recommended
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
• 2 GB or more RAM. 4 GB or more recommended for high number of connections and transactions
• Disk subsystem: Fast disk drives with <16 ms access time recommended. RAID 5 recommended to provide redundancy in mission critical operations
• Web Server: IIS 6 or later supported
• For MTWeb support: PHP 5.4 required, PHP 5.5.16 recommended

MassTransit Administrator client

• CPU: Intel or AMD processor. Minimum recommended speed is 2GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent
• Windows 2003, Windows 2008, Windows 2012, Windows XP SP3 Professional, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1 or Windows 10
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

MassTransit Web Client for Windows

• CPU: Intel or AMD processor. Minimum recommended speed is 2GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent
• Windows XP SP3 Professional, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1 or Windows 10
• Supported web browsers: IE 8, 9, 10 and 11 (32-bit mode only), Firefox 3 or higher
• Supported web browsers with HTTP file transfer only: IE 8 or later 64-bit, Chrome 3.0 or higher

MassTransit Web Client for the Mac OS

• Intel Macintosh® computer
• Mac OS X 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10.10 or 10.11 Client.
• Supported web browsers: Safari 3 or higher, Firefox 3 or higher. Note that drag & drop file uploading is not available for Firefox on the Mac or Safari 6 or later.
• Supported web browsers with HTTP file transfer only: Chrome 3.0 or higher

MassTransit Web Client for Linux

• Supported web browsers with HTTP file transfer only: Chrome 3.0 or higher

Documentation:

Download the Acronis MassTransit Whitepaper (PDF).