Amy Hoerle, Systems Administrator | Think Mutual Bank

 

Think Mutual Bank

Think Mutual Bank depends heavily on GoAnywhere to generate hundreds of scheduled reports, as well as to send data to and pull data from a variety of vendors and trading partners. Fortunately for Systems Administrator Amy Hoerle, GoAnywhere is flexible enough to easily adjust to changing demands.


 Transcript:

My name is Amy Hoerle. I work for Think Mutual Bank. I am the system administrator and I just work hard to keep our systems up and running.

How are you using GoAnywhere?

Scheduling

We use GoAnywhere very heavily. We have a lot of scheduled reports. There are a lot of vendors that we need to communicate with on a daily basis, so we have to get our files transferred out and in every day and kick off processes. So we run a lot of automated processes so if GoAnywhere isn't there and it's not working, we have people calling immediately. So it's very important to us.

Encryption

We do a variety of encryptions, some internal are not encrypted, but most of what we do is both PGP and FTPS.

Job Triggers

There are some vendors that we work with that we must send data to them, so reports to them. Then there are a lot of customers and companies that we work with where we have to pull the data in and then maybe run another process and so we have all of that. And the great thing about GoAnywhere is that it's so flexible so we can schedule things and we can say, "All right, here's the file. We pulled it in. Now we're going to kick off this other thing and maybe now it needs to trigger a project on another system." All of that is automated and seamless.

Data Translation

We just started using data translation. People started asking, "Hey, can we start getting this in an Excel spreadsheet?" rather than however else we've been doing it so that's something new that we're getting into and our testing has been very positive.

Backup

One thing we do with GoAnywhere is we do some backups, so there are some files that we just want to be able to pull off quick and have accessible so we just move them off onto our file server so it's kind of a quick little hot back up that we can run anytime. There are certain fixes that we deploy using GoAnywhere, so we get notified that this new version is available and we have it automatically run -- pull the files down, make the necessary updates and send the notifications that it's done, So we're not doing that work, which I don't think is normal.

I think when you first think of GoAnywhere, you think I am just transferring files and we do much more with that because we're also automating updates.

 

How has the error reporting helped make your processes more efficient?

Our normal issue is that the vendor that we work with had an issue and they didn't get their reports ready. That's typically our issue. Usually we just have it all automated and we get an alert and we just say, "All right, we're going to go retry it later," or we call the vendor and say, "You know what? You forgot to get our reports," and then we rerun the project and it's very simple.

 

Has the Linoma Support staff been helpful?

The support staff is excellent, they get back to you right away.

When I started at the bank, it was always, hey, GoAnywhere is always there and always running and we didn't really think about, hey, maybe we should update it and what are all the new features that have been put into the product and so that was one of the things I did upon starting. I contacted support they were very helpful, explained the process, had an error, they stuck with me and we got it resolved in a very short period of time.

 

What else do you like about GoAnywhere?

If we want to create another GoAnywhere project, we don't even think about it. It's just like, "all right, let's go in, let's do it," and in a few clicks we're done. I mean if I had to sit and write a script, pretty much FTP is second nature for me because I have done it for so long, but still, there are so many things that could go wrong that you have to check for that I can automate and make simple within GoAnywhere, that would take me a lot of time elsewhere.

We use GoAnywhere because it works and it's extremely flexible.