For this regional bank, managed file transfer isn’t a back-office utility, it’s the circulation system of the institution. Every day, critical payment files, statements, regulatory reports and batch workloads move across iSeries, IBM Z and distributed systems. For nearly two decades, IBM Sterling Connect:Direct on z/OS has been the bank’s standard for secure, reliable file movement across these platforms, forming the backbone of its MFT estate.
As the environment grew, so did the complexity. Hundreds of Connect:Direct nodes were spun up to support new applications and lines of business. App teams on the distributed side were rightly empowered to move fast, but that speed came at a cost to governance and manageability.
The business challenge: Upgrades that took years
The shared infrastructure team was accountable for keeping the Connect:Direct environment patched, secure and compliant. Each application group owned its own user acceptance testing (UAT) and regression cycle. Each upgrade required bespoke coordination and scheduling. Patches were applied cautiously, one node at a time, because there was no safe way to orchestrate concurrent changes at scale. This led to :
The bank needed a way to modernize MFT operations without disrupting a platform that had been stable for nearly 20 years.
The solution: A centralized management plane for MFT
The bank chose IBM Sterling Control Center Director (CCD) as the centralized management plane for its Connect:Direct deployments. IBM Sterling Control Center Director is designed to provide centralized management and monitoring of large-scale, distributed Connect:Direct environments, enabling administrators to manage upgrades, configurations and licensing from a single console.
For this regional bank, Control Center Director became the foundation for a new way of working:
-
Automated lifecycle management: Upgrades, maintenance, certificate rotation and configuration propagation were all orchestrated centrally, with remote execution to each node.
The program was delivered collaboratively by the bank’s shared infrastructure team, IBM Technology Expert Labs, and the IBM Sterling product team. IBM experts helped the bank design the rollout strategy, establish best practices for configuration and automation for their specific environment.
The results: Years of work compressed into six months
The bank now transformed how it manages its MFT backbone.
Why IBM: A trusted MFT backbone, now easier to run at scale
IBM Sterling Connect:Direct has been the bank’s trusted file transfer solution for around 20 years, uniquely bridging z/OS and iSeries with distributed systems while providing secure, high-volume transfer capabilities.
By adding IBM Sterling Control Center Director, the bank didn’t have to rethink its MFT standard. Instead, it gained the single, centralized control plane the shared infrastructure team needed to manage at scale with confidence.
What began as an upgrade initiative has become a strategic platform for ongoing automation. The bank is now exploring how the same patterns can support future Connect:Direct releases, new environments and broader adoption of the IBM Sterling Managed File Transfer portfolio.