Many organizations that employ electronic data interchange (EDI) in their business-to-business (B2B) transactions exchange EDI messages through the Applicability Statement 2 (AS2) protocol. EDI communications carried out over AS2 are sometimes called AS2 EDI. Known for being secure, cost effective and reliable, AS2 EDI is commonly used in automobile and manufacturing supply chains. It’s also popular in healthcare, retail and e-commerce industries.

An FTP site is a server that enables you to upload and download files through the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Many people use FTP sites to move large files or numerous files from one computer system to another across a network.

What is AS2 protocol?

AS2 or Applicability Statement 2 is a file transfer protocol that’s commonly used in business-to-business (B2B) data transfers. It’s based on the S/MIME and HTTP/S protocols. While you can theoretically use AS2 to transfer almost any type of file, it’s normally associated with electronic data interchange (EDI).

When you first start scouting for the right file transfer protocol for your organization, you’re bound to encounter these two acronyms: SFTP and MFT. SFTP stands for SSH File Transfer Protocol, whereas MFT stands for Managed File Transfer. While SFTP is indeed a protocol, MFT isn’t. Nevertheless, these two acronyms become increasingly intertwined once you explore advanced, secure, automated file transfer solutions.

Some people are unsure of the difference between MFT Gateway and SFTP server. These are two distinct applications with different core functionalities. Combine them, and you’ll get a more secure, compliant, and highly available file transfer environment.

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) are two cryptographic software tools that enable data encryption, authentication, and integrity. These tools primarily secure email communications and transfer files. In the case of the latter, PGP and GPG can be particularly useful in providing data-in-motion security for unencrypted file transfer protocols like FTP and HTTP. They also provide data-at-rest encryption for files stored in a file transfer server.

Automated SFTP file transfers are traditionally done through scripts, but there's a much easier way. In this tutorial, we'll show you how to automate SFTP file transfers without scripting a single line of code.

Overview

In an earlier quickstart guide to setting up an AS2 server, we featured a manual method for sending EDI messages. Because EDI transactions are best carried out automatically, we thought it would be a good idea to show you how to implement real-time transactions on the same solution we used in that post.

AS2 (applicability statement 2) uses public keys and private keys to encrypt files being transferred between IP addresses. With AS2, security, authentication, message integrity and privacy are ensured with encryption, digital certificates and nonrepudiation techniques. AS2 provides greater security for your EDI data than standard FTP, supporting synchronous and asynchronous MDN (message disposition notification) and digital signatures.

Plus, with JSCAPE's AS2 server you can send files regardless of file size and content type.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn the basic steps for setting up an Applicability Statement 2 (AS2) server. While the final outcome will only be a rudimentary AS2 setup, the steps you’ll encounter along the way are crucial in understanding AS2 configuration concepts. That said, we’ll be sharing links to other AS2 tutorials as we move along. When you combine all these tutorials, you’ll be able to configure a server for production-grade AS2 workflows.

Overview: What Is AES?

First adopted by the U.S. government to protect classified information, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) has long gained global acceptance and is used for securing sensitive data in various industries. In this post, we'll discuss AES encryption and explain its vital role in securing sensitive files sent over the Internet.