Are you ready for SFTP?

When Bloomberg introduced the Data License service several years ago, access was done through FTP. Since then Bloomberg have extended the service to support more secure protocols such as HTTPS and SFTP. FTP is now considered a legacy, highly insecure transport protocol and the company has been urging its customers to migrate to the more secure SFTP protocol since March 2015.

Bloomberg have given clients time to consider the implications of moving internal systems to SFTP as such a move can be complex for larger customers with legacy internal systems. The deadline to migrate to SFTP is set to 31st March 2016.

Along with the migration to SFTP, Bloomberg are reinforcing account password strength by setting a minimum length of 16 characters on Bloomberg SFTP passwords. Previously passwords were 8 characters long. This can also have an impact on internal systems and clients must test to ensure their applications support this functionality.

XMon fully supports Bloomberg’s SFTP protocol and secure 16 character password length. This switch can be achieved in a few clicks: navigate to your defined Bloomberg FTP data source and select the protocol to SFTP, set the new password and server name (see screenshot) and all communication to Bloomberg will now done over SFTP.

Change XMon source to SFTP

Get in touch if you’d like to know more about the Bloomberg SFTP migration and how we can help with the transition.