Remote Agents

GoAnywhere UK & Ireland User Group 2021

 

Please see below our remote agents webinar. It explains the role and functions of remote agents and also gives examples of use cases.

This will help businesses understand how best to utilise remote agents to increase business efficiency. 

 

Video Transcript

by Richard Auger

 

Hello, my name is Richard Augur. I'm a senior technical language working protocol. I specialise in managed file transfer software and in particular go anywhere MFT. I'd like to just give you a small rundown of remote agents, what they are, what they do and talk about some of the use cases we've seen remote agents.

Please feel free to use the questions panel, to ask any questions that you might have as we go through the session, we'll use the chat to respond to them. Please be aware I'm also going to be on the Q&A session later. Answer any other questions that you might have at that time?

So what are remote agents? Well effectively, they are clients that sit out on another machine, but can be centrally managed. So as you can see on the slide that care, we offload the workload that we would normally perform on our central MFT server onto another machine we create. Complaints of workflows and we can distribute these templates across to a number of different client machines using the remote agent functionality.

All of this is done across an HTTPS connection. So it's not like we have to open up a whole bunch of rules from the client machines so that they can get back to the remote agent servers. So remote agent rules, they can trigger on the share tool. Also they can trigger on a, on a folder monitor. So if you have a file turnip on your remote agent machine, you can immediately interact with that file.

You can manage it in some former. So when we do trigger the real remote agent rules, these rules can push and pull the files up and down between go anywhere and the remote agent machine. Now they can also monitor, um, any folder path and reach any folder path. Be it a UNC, an SFTP or FTPs, or even as your blob or AWS, as long as it is known to the remote.

So that means if the remote machine is in another network that you would not normally have access to, it's providing you an entry point into that network.

So what can remote agents do? Well, they can actually do quite a bit, to be honest. Um, here are some examples now of what the remote agent rules can can perform. Now we tend to think about a remote agent as being able to grab a file and send a file when it appears on that local machine, but we can do a bunch of, uh, bits with it as well.

So you'll see, for example, if we need to increase. That file or decrypt, if it's suddenly arrived from somewhere, if we need to zip a file or unzipper file, even when it turns up on that client machine. Now I'm not going to go through the whole list of things here. You can, you can see what's on the screen obviously, but some bits are more interesting than others.

So for example, running a native command, this means that you can use the client script to launch, uh, or, or the client agent, sorry to launch a screen. On that client machine. One of my favorite features is that we can provide access to local storage. So that means that this agent can be a repository for files that we want to upload into our central storage.

We'll talk about that a little bit later in one of the use cases.

So what use cases do I have to show you? Well, the obvious one is a supply chain. So remote agents in supply chain, they do a great job. Um, you tend to find, uh, if you have a warehouse, uh, that is not owned by your company, then it's difficult to get your software onto computer in that warehouse. Um, if you provide that computer and you've got remote agent on that, as long as that computer has access to the internet through, I don't know, a local wifi or some such, then it's going to allow us to produce some information in that warehouse computer that we've created locally centrally.

So a good example for that is we are going to create a Pickler. When something needs to go and load up the truck to decide what's going to leave the warehouse. We can take care of that from inside the go anywhere MFT environment. Now the next use case I have is mobile users. Obviously go anywhere. We have the go drive model.

Okay. Now go drive is going to allow us to synchronise, um, uh, a folder between a mobile device, a laptop, or a mobile phone, or even a server, if you wanted to. And the central go anywhere server, but using a remote agent, we can actually perform some more work on this mobile device now. At this point, we're no longer talking about mobile phones.

We're talking about a laptop computer, for example. And a good example of that is, um, uh, this train case that we can see here. So in this particular use case, um, an engineer would be on the train. And getting, um, up to the minute information from the train through a local connection, and then sending that back up into the headquarters for the train service.

But you know, if you do it on the train, why wouldn't you want to do it on a, on a bus? So an example of that might be, we want to pick up the number of people that are on that bus, especially, you know, we're down in lockdown at the moment. We can only have, um, every other seat, field and so on. Um, being able to get this information to the central Buster pu uh, can be quite useful,

public accessible devices. In the old days of first putting cameras out onto a look at a road. When you have a speed camera or any kind of traffic camera, that's going to be recording, they would have to periodically perform an STP to upload all of the data they're captured into the central server. Now that's a bit risky because they wouldn't be doing it continually.

They can't poll. Um, so it would just be a federal send of that data. Maybe once every 15 minutes, once every hour and a lot can happen in that time using the remote agent, we can actually trigger the transfers as soon as it happens. So if somebody is driving really radically. Super fast or some such thing.

We can have a file uploaded and have that information accessible to whoever needs it within seconds.

One of our current use cases is full of arbitrary work. So we have a hybrid deployment where we have go anywhere in a cloud scenario. And we have remote agents, um, installed on the computers in the lab environment. These computers in the lab environment aren't necessarily connected to each other, but they do have the possibility to reach the internet.

Now, this means that whenever you're trying to save work, when we're trying to share information between the computers, it can be controlled by all of the information coming up to the central. And what's more. I spoke about templates a few minutes ago. We can use these templates in order to make sure that every one of our computers gets the same configuration deployed to it simplifies our overheads for administration.

What about remote development? So one of our customers has, um, offshore development teams. Um, they need to form their work outside of the network. Um, every time that they make their changes, uh, every time they send in some new code, it can be lifted automatically. So instead of a local server, as soon as they've hit that save button, it's going to be replicated internally.

Supermarkets. This is the example that I normally give to people. When everyone talk about remote agent, if you think about supermarkets, you've generally got a headquarters or maybe a regional headquarters for the supermarket chain. Now each one of the supermarkets has a final server inside the Superman.

Okay. It will be stuck in the back-office somewhere. Um, and we can have stock levels on that computer. We can have the ability to, um, uh, to reach out and print something locally if we need to some labels, some pricing and so on. So the agent installed or the, the client, um, agent that we installed on that machine is going to be able to take care of the sending of data and the retrieving of updates for.

Now a good example of that might be if you've got, um, local flyers. Now these are generally produced by the local supermarket, sending an email or sending a PDF or some such thing up to a central location, and then back out to a print shop somewhere. If you're using a local print shop, then we can connect directly from that final server into the print shop.

As soon as we have the information for, for what needs to be printed.

Um, now go anywhere. It's very powerful. Of course. Uh, it's especially powerful when it comes to the remote agent. So we can now have, um, uh, an end to end processing, uh, right. The way from the moment a file is first created or an event occurs on that remote agent. The data can be pulled all the way back into, into go anywhere or go anywhere to be more correct.

Um, and can be handled, um, uh, correctly. But the agent itself, we can perform a lot of work with that agent. We can go out, we can do the encryption, the zipping, we can talk to databases. We can even do some low level conversion of files in say a XL format. We need to.

The main point of that is that we get a view, um, on the end to end processing every step of the way we can actually interact with what's going on. We can write some log information out so that we've got a full trace all the way through. Now, this is a slightly older use case, but we have, uh, the, the ability to, or we had, um, a customer who was interested in, uh, construction surveys.

So they send surveyors out onto site. Um, the surveyor, as soon as he's taking information, um, taking some recordings, he's uploading that information into, um, a backend database up in the, uh, the surveyor's office. And that information then spurs a process into being in the back end, which is going to process that data in some way, once that data has been processed, then the surveyor is going to want some information.

Back about the results. You know, I have to tell him that he successfully updated something or there's something else needs to be done as well as the work that he's already before.

Final couple of use cases, um, an FTP server migrations. So in this case, the agent, the sole purpose for using the agent was to replicate an FTP server from its current location to a new location. Every time somebody is uploading files into this FTP server, it's triggering a mini workflow to take those files and replicate those to the main server.

Now at some point when the customer's happy that they can switch over the old server to the new, all of the data that's been uploaded by FTP is going to be available to them. The last use case, um, we have a network of computers, um, for one of our customers and they have installed agents on these computers.

Now that gives us the possibility to do, um, say NSFTP upload from any one of these computers into the central go anywhere server. Now the web user that's being used inside the SFTP sign-on has got matched to it. Um, uh, an agent directory on another machine. So this is allowing us to do an SFTP from one computer.

Directly into another. Well, to be fair, the last step of the way is going to be HTTPS. But the simple fact of it is we're no longer doing an SMB transferred data across a, a regular Photoshop. This is information that's only going to travel in a secured way across our network, um, and also be centrally recorded.

So we have a log file for everything that's moved through our, um, our network. We'll have all of the information about. When it started when it finished, if there are any problems and we'll be safe to know that everything was done securely. Okay. If you have any questions, can I please ask you to post them into the chat window and we'll take a look through them and hopefully we'll be able to answer them in the question, answer session.

Oh, I need to just flush this screen up for you. Uh, as an event discount, anybody that is attending this live can claim a 25% discount on professional services. So some of my time, which becoming cheap to you, and finally, let's have a look to see what's coming up next. Okay. So the next point that I have is going to be Elsa lovely Elsa talking to us about cloud migration.

Thank you very much.