Customer Success Story:
Integrating file transfer processes in cloud accelerates IT response to big oil business dynamics

“With any new FTP request, we create an organization for that partner and set up a transfer for anyone in just a few minutes. Another big benefit is we now have a centralized UI to monitor all files and alerts when files fail to be transferred.”

This multibillion-dollar independent crude oil and natural gas development and exploration company generates and digests massive amounts of digital oilfield data daily. Well level economics, predictive analytics, geological and geophysical exploration, drilling, fracking and production data volumes can exceed 10TB of data per day for a single well.

Business Objectives

Every day reports generated on this “Big Data”—such as drilling activity, well level budgeting, production rates, seismic activity, gas-oil-ratios and what-if scenarios—are sent to the company’s backend systems. This information is digested by ERP, accounting, data reservoirs and analytics tools to help the company quickly discover and remedy equipment malfunctions, choose optimal well locations, discover areas of production efficiency and make timely, informed business decisions.

To ensure the success of its data driven processes, the company decided to make an investment in the improvement of its file transfer system. The company had already adopted a cloud-first model with the goal of eliminating the expense and time investment associated with managing data centers and on-premises equipment.

Its primary business objective was to migrate to a modern, cloud-based solution to consolidate file exchange management and improve end-to-end file transfer operations.

Technology Challenges

Prior to using Thru, the company relied on outdated on-premises FTP servers. These services required time-consuming manual processes and custom scripts for integrating with business applications, monitoring file transfer activity and onboarding users and trading partners.

With no ability to track and report on file transfer progress, file transmission failures frequently went unnoticed. Requests to onboard new trading partners and customers required high-in-demand programming resources, resulting in long lead times to respond to increasing business demands. These brittle FTP servers had become extremely complicated to maintain and were neither scalable nor sustainable.

Additionally, since the company had recently made a significant investment in integrating its business processes with the MuleSoft® Anypoint Platform™, it made business sense to move forward with a modern application integration instead of upgrading the outdated FTP servers.

“We looked at a few solutions but Thru was definitely one of the easiest and most efficient for our use cases where we want to point files from one source and be sent to multiple targets. We like that Thru was set up for that.”

Solution

Thru enabled the company to achieve its MFT modernization goal by replacing its outdated FTP technology with Thru’s file transfer service and Thru MFT Connector for MuleSoft. The company’s IT department no longer spends excessive time scrutinizing file transfer logs to diagnose failed file transfers or writing cumbersome scripts onboarding partners and interacting with internal business applications.

The oil and gas company deployed Thru’s cloud-based, enterprise-grade managed file transfer service, meeting its requirements with

• Native integration into the Anypoint Platform simplifying addition of file transfers to MuleSoft flows.
• Instant scalability ensuring business agility—no waiting for software and hardware procurement and installation.
• Automated recurring file transfer activities retrieving files from folders on users’ computers without their involvement.
• Real-time end-to-end visibility into file transfer activities and status.
• System-wide audit trail providing capture of every file transfer activity.
• Guaranteed delivery for fault tolerant file transfer including auto resume and recovery.
• Simple trading partner onboarding dramatically decreasing onboarding time from weeks to just minutes.

Business Impact and Results

Now, when the company needs to onboard a new trading partner for file exchange, diagnose a file transfer issue or add file transfer capabilities to new MuleSoft flows, it can easily and quickly handle it using the Thru MFT Connector for MuleSoft.

With the comprehensive Thru solution, the company’s IT team now provides incremental business agility:

• Quickly scale file transfer capabilities to accommodate commercial dynamics, remote locations and new lines of business.
  With no more manual scripting one-off point-to-point file transfer connections, setup and deployment have been a breeze for the oil and gas company.
• Automate and extend MuleSoft flows with just a point-and-click.
  The company now uses a single platform to create file transfer workflows and instantly integrate them to Mule flows using the Thru MFT Connector for MuleSoft. Since Thru uses a pub/sub model to add subscribers to workflows, the company can add any number of organizations and endpoints to a single workflow to fulfill its many-to-one and one-to-many use cases.
• Reduce operational risk by monitoring all file activity in real-time.
  Critical files are no longer lost; deadlines aren’t missed; and, trading partners no longer experience downtimes due to lack of information. Dashboards and alerts allow the oil and gas company to administer, configure, monitor, analyze and resolve file transfer issues in real time.
• Centralize scheduling, tracking and control of all file exchanges to improve visibility and rapid issue resolution.
  The company is now able to monitor the entire file transfer process across its enterprise. The company has a way to keep a comprehensive record of the movement of sensitive files, recording all file transfer events for system-wide visibility, auditability and detailed reporting.
• Improve business agility and trading partner experience.
  The oil and gas company is very pleased with how much faster it can respond to new file exchange requests from its partners and lines of business. Thru integrated with MuleSoft lets partners point-and-click to subscribe to new file exchange workflows, freeing the company from time-consuming scripting of one-to-one endpoint integrations.