The disadvantages I see in IBM Sterling File Gateway include price and reporting. Reporting is not very easy. If 10 people are putting file transfer using this protocol, determining who did what file transfer, how long it took, what encryption was done, and whether it was accessed by somebody or whether it was fully done without any retrial is difficult. Reporting is a big problem in IBM tool, according to our customers' complaints. When there is an audit requiring proof that a file has gone in a secure way, most customers have not been able to prove it. Additionally, when there is a large file transfer which has to be done in multiple pieces because of bandwidth restriction, they have not been able to do splitting. The splitting was not possible during file transfer. Many customers have asked if they can split the file and then send it, or pick and choose and send it from a large file. It was also found that it was hogging the bandwidth whenever it was doing file transfer. Ultimately, we ended up selling HP also. The tracking and monitoring features of IBM Sterling File Gateway present some challenges, particularly with tracking, monitoring and compliance issues which RBI is asking for. While it was possible to address these issues, it required an expert to figure it out. When expertise business activity is required, it costs money to customers who are not willing to pay. Regarding future features to make it more competitive, automation email could be one feature I recommend where once the file transfer is done, an email or log should be created for the admin person confirming successful completion. Second is 24/7 support in case of any issues. IBM has never been able to give round-the-clock support whereas customers can ship files even at midnight. Our support is also based on support from IBM. The third improvement area could be automation release notes. IBM has never given us or customers notifications when a new release or patch has come. Whenever a patch is released, an email should go to the buyer or user and to the reseller so they can sync up whether to upgrade the patch or not.
Principal Middleware & Database Admin at Cache Cloud INC
Real User
Top 10
Dec 12, 2024
The product itself wasn't very easy to comprehend. I required a lot of customization that didn’t meet my needs. I resolved more issues than IBM did. Sterling needs better testing for larger customers and requires improvement as it is pretty outdated.
I’ve been part of this client for the last seven-plus years. It’s been close to 70 to 80 continuous improvements we have delivered. The priority ones which we always shortlist are the recurring incidents or recurring issues, which came in the initial phase of the year when we took this entire landscape under our maintenance. One such incident I can recollect is with respect to performance tuning. We committed to our users 99.99% and above as the availability metrics for Sterling Integrator. This has acted as a high-availability system, but we treat it as mission-critical. When it comes to the commitment we give to users, we have to ensure the system is kept most stable. So, the majority of the problem was in the communication channels. Whenever we enabled additional logging for the communication channel, the system used to have hiccups. So we worked with the vendor, stating that the visibility channel framework needs to be changed because the moment we enable more logging, it literally brings the system down, or the system doesn’t work as it should. They took our input and delivered a better framework in their next releases, which helped us after upgrading to have that stability intact. As the system grows, we ensure to have performance tuning triggered and optimize the business process wherever required. For example, by default, Sterling Integrator business process will have full logging enabled. We took care of those things. Not all business processes or workflows require full logging enabled. Only a few critical ones require every step logs. For the rest, we categorized and reduced the logging for those workflows. That actually helped us to increase the IO overall from ten milliseconds to six milliseconds. That was a good achievement. Apart from that, in terms of queues, how we maintain the queues, how we defined all file queues across the critical business process is one thing we felt was done better. The threads we assign for the priority queues and the business processes were configured to those priority queues, whatever is critical, so that it gets high priority to allow the threads to process. So that queue thread Sterling was taken under the performance tuning. Apart from that, I think some of the best practices which IBM recommends is what we usually run through every year. We just have the health check done through IBM, and we just ensure that all the best practice recommendations are added in the system.
Based on my experience, there's some room for improvement. We're currently using version 6.1.1, which has a limitation where files are purged after seven days. We have to restart the purge count manually through our standard procedure. This issue should be resolved in the latest version.
The weakness is that the engines associated with the tool require too much expertise to master how they work. Finding people who know the product from the market or choosing IT personnel to work with can be challenging. Improvements can be made to the tool's user interface and user experience. It would be good for the tool to develop a command-line interface to replace all the scripts present in the product and execute all the different scripts. Currently, what we are looking at in the tool is already in development. It should support different storage solutions on the cloud, be it on AWS Azure, Google, or even if it is something different, like S3. The product is currently integrating with the full support of the protocols. There should be support for different storage solutions on the cloud. I want the tool to support Google Drive. I feel the tool's setup process could be made better, but it can be difficult because the tool's vendor has been proposing a lot of different implementation methods. You can use it on the cloud or install it on the cloud, Windows, or Linux, and the tool needs to manage it on all the different operational systems. On the on-premises part, it is different from how it is on the cloud. For me, being able to install the tool can be complicated if I consider how I want to configure it. I want the tool to offer a CLI or a command line interface to help the users figure out how to work with the tool. The tool's scalability can be made better. Currently, we are using a cluster, so you can always add more nodes. You can upgrade each node and its capacity for processing. In the cluster, when you add a node, you don't do just one node, so the cluster needs some processing abilities to manage all the nodes. It is a very scalable tool, and it has good capability. If you go for the cloud installation instead of an on-premises one, you are able to develop the scalability for any project on the cloud because it has the infrastructure to process as many nodes as you need. I think what could be improved for the support is understanding that any answer must be used by the user in practice. Sometimes, when you have an answer, it is not acceptable because sometimes it is not defined. Sometimes, when the product is improved or supports some new feature, it acts too limited to be useful. My issue is that depending on the module you want support for, you can have good support, but the support is more like five or four out of ten because the support changes and doesn't understand how the product is used by the user or how it should work. I recently raised a ticket with support. We had an issue with the tool, and the support had one of my previous tickets but told me to do something, and I found that the response was not good. The support wanted us to change our environment parameters, which would have an impact on the other software tools. The support did not understand, and it was hard for us to explain that we could not break all those systems just to correct the issue on a single software. Lots of exchanges had to happen between our company and the support team just to explain a response to an issue in practice and in theory. The support team's solution could be great, but in practice, it was not so good.
We conduct monthly maintenance. When the system becomes unstable, mainly when it receives a large volume of data simultaneously from the source, it can lead to issues. This instability might cause all devices to enter a routing state. In such cases, we need to manually verify and redeliver the files to ensure they are properly transferred. Alternatively, we can use the Fireflies mailbox to handle bulk file transfers. During instability, files might remain in the source and routing states. By checking the event details, we can confirm the delivery status of individual files.
Assistant Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
Oct 3, 2022
The admin console needs some work. There are old buttons and limitations when looking for logs. required the reason why has so old way of buttons and limitations for looking at logs.
IBM is advising not to use the IT translate anymore but this is going to be an extra cost to the customer to use the alternative. Additionally, the solution can improve the REST API protocols. If you look at the REST API client services available, you can do an API call to any other API exposed, but the way the API comes it is not treated right.
Performance and Reliability Consultant at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Real User
Nov 10, 2020
One of the issues with this solution is that it has so many features which is in itself the problem. It should be just a simple file transfer solution. It's very frustrating because it's a very rich tool but it has so many problems. The UI is essentially not good, the interaction with the control center and report runs are not good. The usability, performance, and reliability, are absolutely no good. There is a newer version, perhaps it's better.
Senior Manager - Architecture and Standards at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
Real User
Sep 1, 2020
I think it would be good if IBM continues to focus on the primary use of Sterling File Gateway which is file transfer. They can continue to expand those capabilities. We can already get the files securely and we can work with the partner on some of the schedule. But the solution might also cover working with different aspects of the workflow. We have quite a big spectrum of customers in our portfolio, and having more options could help us to better work with them. The workflow capabilities are some of the key features as to why I believe IBM Sterling has been picked as a solution for this type of product in the past. I have been exploring whether we can expand API capabilities. I am studying what they have to offer now, but I would like it if the solution could offer even more support of API usage. It would be good to be able to make API calls yourself to do more with integration. With a more open API trend, we could place more focus on this area. That would be something I would really be looking for in future releases. The version that we are using will be going through some changes in support from IBM. I want to start the long term roadmap to look at how that affects our usage.
The areas that need improvement are user management, user interface, and the segregation of users. These are the areas that I am battling with at the moment. It's not geared towards your user community. If you're an administrator of the system, it's fairly easy, but then to segregate the configuration and give the availability to it, it's a bit of a nightmare. In the next release, I would like to see upgraded user segregation, user management, and looking into auto-deploys. Once you need to deploy a new bundle of software, you need some service downtime. I would like to see auto-deployment without service disruptions. That is what this industry is always looking at. When you deploy something, you want your service to always be on, and with this solution that is not the case.
Securely manage transfer files with authentication, encryption and audit trails while you retain administrative control of data using a library of templates.Sterling File Gateway can help you increase secure and dependable file transfer with your trading partners. It consolidates disparate centers of file transfer activity and facilitates the security-rich exchange of file-based data over the Internet. It helps companies avoid the risk and operational issues that can result from using loosely...
The disadvantages I see in IBM Sterling File Gateway include price and reporting. Reporting is not very easy. If 10 people are putting file transfer using this protocol, determining who did what file transfer, how long it took, what encryption was done, and whether it was accessed by somebody or whether it was fully done without any retrial is difficult. Reporting is a big problem in IBM tool, according to our customers' complaints. When there is an audit requiring proof that a file has gone in a secure way, most customers have not been able to prove it. Additionally, when there is a large file transfer which has to be done in multiple pieces because of bandwidth restriction, they have not been able to do splitting. The splitting was not possible during file transfer. Many customers have asked if they can split the file and then send it, or pick and choose and send it from a large file. It was also found that it was hogging the bandwidth whenever it was doing file transfer. Ultimately, we ended up selling HP also. The tracking and monitoring features of IBM Sterling File Gateway present some challenges, particularly with tracking, monitoring and compliance issues which RBI is asking for. While it was possible to address these issues, it required an expert to figure it out. When expertise business activity is required, it costs money to customers who are not willing to pay. Regarding future features to make it more competitive, automation email could be one feature I recommend where once the file transfer is done, an email or log should be created for the admin person confirming successful completion. Second is 24/7 support in case of any issues. IBM has never been able to give round-the-clock support whereas customers can ship files even at midnight. Our support is also based on support from IBM. The third improvement area could be automation release notes. IBM has never given us or customers notifications when a new release or patch has come. Whenever a patch is released, an email should go to the buyer or user and to the reseller so they can sync up whether to upgrade the patch or not.
The product itself wasn't very easy to comprehend. I required a lot of customization that didn’t meet my needs. I resolved more issues than IBM did. Sterling needs better testing for larger customers and requires improvement as it is pretty outdated.
I’ve been part of this client for the last seven-plus years. It’s been close to 70 to 80 continuous improvements we have delivered. The priority ones which we always shortlist are the recurring incidents or recurring issues, which came in the initial phase of the year when we took this entire landscape under our maintenance. One such incident I can recollect is with respect to performance tuning. We committed to our users 99.99% and above as the availability metrics for Sterling Integrator. This has acted as a high-availability system, but we treat it as mission-critical. When it comes to the commitment we give to users, we have to ensure the system is kept most stable. So, the majority of the problem was in the communication channels. Whenever we enabled additional logging for the communication channel, the system used to have hiccups. So we worked with the vendor, stating that the visibility channel framework needs to be changed because the moment we enable more logging, it literally brings the system down, or the system doesn’t work as it should. They took our input and delivered a better framework in their next releases, which helped us after upgrading to have that stability intact. As the system grows, we ensure to have performance tuning triggered and optimize the business process wherever required. For example, by default, Sterling Integrator business process will have full logging enabled. We took care of those things. Not all business processes or workflows require full logging enabled. Only a few critical ones require every step logs. For the rest, we categorized and reduced the logging for those workflows. That actually helped us to increase the IO overall from ten milliseconds to six milliseconds. That was a good achievement. Apart from that, in terms of queues, how we maintain the queues, how we defined all file queues across the critical business process is one thing we felt was done better. The threads we assign for the priority queues and the business processes were configured to those priority queues, whatever is critical, so that it gets high priority to allow the threads to process. So that queue thread Sterling was taken under the performance tuning. Apart from that, I think some of the best practices which IBM recommends is what we usually run through every year. We just have the health check done through IBM, and we just ensure that all the best practice recommendations are added in the system.
Based on my experience, there's some room for improvement. We're currently using version 6.1.1, which has a limitation where files are purged after seven days. We have to restart the purge count manually through our standard procedure. This issue should be resolved in the latest version.
The weakness is that the engines associated with the tool require too much expertise to master how they work. Finding people who know the product from the market or choosing IT personnel to work with can be challenging. Improvements can be made to the tool's user interface and user experience. It would be good for the tool to develop a command-line interface to replace all the scripts present in the product and execute all the different scripts. Currently, what we are looking at in the tool is already in development. It should support different storage solutions on the cloud, be it on AWS Azure, Google, or even if it is something different, like S3. The product is currently integrating with the full support of the protocols. There should be support for different storage solutions on the cloud. I want the tool to support Google Drive. I feel the tool's setup process could be made better, but it can be difficult because the tool's vendor has been proposing a lot of different implementation methods. You can use it on the cloud or install it on the cloud, Windows, or Linux, and the tool needs to manage it on all the different operational systems. On the on-premises part, it is different from how it is on the cloud. For me, being able to install the tool can be complicated if I consider how I want to configure it. I want the tool to offer a CLI or a command line interface to help the users figure out how to work with the tool. The tool's scalability can be made better. Currently, we are using a cluster, so you can always add more nodes. You can upgrade each node and its capacity for processing. In the cluster, when you add a node, you don't do just one node, so the cluster needs some processing abilities to manage all the nodes. It is a very scalable tool, and it has good capability. If you go for the cloud installation instead of an on-premises one, you are able to develop the scalability for any project on the cloud because it has the infrastructure to process as many nodes as you need. I think what could be improved for the support is understanding that any answer must be used by the user in practice. Sometimes, when you have an answer, it is not acceptable because sometimes it is not defined. Sometimes, when the product is improved or supports some new feature, it acts too limited to be useful. My issue is that depending on the module you want support for, you can have good support, but the support is more like five or four out of ten because the support changes and doesn't understand how the product is used by the user or how it should work. I recently raised a ticket with support. We had an issue with the tool, and the support had one of my previous tickets but told me to do something, and I found that the response was not good. The support wanted us to change our environment parameters, which would have an impact on the other software tools. The support did not understand, and it was hard for us to explain that we could not break all those systems just to correct the issue on a single software. Lots of exchanges had to happen between our company and the support team just to explain a response to an issue in practice and in theory. The support team's solution could be great, but in practice, it was not so good.
We conduct monthly maintenance. When the system becomes unstable, mainly when it receives a large volume of data simultaneously from the source, it can lead to issues. This instability might cause all devices to enter a routing state. In such cases, we need to manually verify and redeliver the files to ensure they are properly transferred. Alternatively, we can use the Fireflies mailbox to handle bulk file transfers. During instability, files might remain in the source and routing states. By checking the event details, we can confirm the delivery status of individual files.
The admin console needs some work. There are old buttons and limitations when looking for logs. required the reason why has so old way of buttons and limitations for looking at logs.
IBM is advising not to use the IT translate anymore but this is going to be an extra cost to the customer to use the alternative. Additionally, the solution can improve the REST API protocols. If you look at the REST API client services available, you can do an API call to any other API exposed, but the way the API comes it is not treated right.
One of the issues with this solution is that it has so many features which is in itself the problem. It should be just a simple file transfer solution. It's very frustrating because it's a very rich tool but it has so many problems. The UI is essentially not good, the interaction with the control center and report runs are not good. The usability, performance, and reliability, are absolutely no good. There is a newer version, perhaps it's better.
I think it would be good if IBM continues to focus on the primary use of Sterling File Gateway which is file transfer. They can continue to expand those capabilities. We can already get the files securely and we can work with the partner on some of the schedule. But the solution might also cover working with different aspects of the workflow. We have quite a big spectrum of customers in our portfolio, and having more options could help us to better work with them. The workflow capabilities are some of the key features as to why I believe IBM Sterling has been picked as a solution for this type of product in the past. I have been exploring whether we can expand API capabilities. I am studying what they have to offer now, but I would like it if the solution could offer even more support of API usage. It would be good to be able to make API calls yourself to do more with integration. With a more open API trend, we could place more focus on this area. That would be something I would really be looking for in future releases. The version that we are using will be going through some changes in support from IBM. I want to start the long term roadmap to look at how that affects our usage.
The areas that need improvement are user management, user interface, and the segregation of users. These are the areas that I am battling with at the moment. It's not geared towards your user community. If you're an administrator of the system, it's fairly easy, but then to segregate the configuration and give the availability to it, it's a bit of a nightmare. In the next release, I would like to see upgraded user segregation, user management, and looking into auto-deploys. Once you need to deploy a new bundle of software, you need some service downtime. I would like to see auto-deployment without service disruptions. That is what this industry is always looking at. When you deploy something, you want your service to always be on, and with this solution that is not the case.