Test managed file transfers before production

Separate testing from production ​

File transfer changes often involve more than the MFT application. Authentication services, firewall rules, remote partners, storage, monitoring, and downstream processing can all affect the final workflow.

Testing these changes in production can interrupt live transfers or expose production data. A separate environment lets your team validate configuration updates, software upgrades, new partner connections, and automated processing before they affect business operations.

Included non-production licences ​

Each SFTPPlus MFT production licence includes the following non-production use at no extra cost:

• One individual development instance.
• One shared testing, user acceptance testing (UAT), staging, or pre-production instance.
• One cold disaster recovery instance.

These instances can run the same SFTPPlus server and client components licensed for production. They are not limited by user count, connection count, CPU cores, memory, file size, or number of transfers.

The development instance is intended for an individual developer or system administrator. It can run on a workstation, laptop, virtual machine, or other system used to prepare configuration and integration changes.

The shared non-production instance can be used for integration testing, UAT, staging, or pre-production. For representative results, configure it with the same authentication methods, network controls, event handlers, and transfer definitions as production, while using test accounts and non-sensitive data.

The cold disaster recovery instance is reserved for recovery when the production system is unavailable. For an active high-availability deployment, review the SFTPPlus MFT cluster options and contact us to confirm the licences required for your architecture.

Run more than one instance on the same host ​

SFTPPlus MFT is self-contained and supports multiple independent installations on one Windows, Linux, or macOS host. Each instance can have its own product version, configuration, service ports, logs, and test accounts.

For example, the production SFTP service can listen on port 22, while a testing instance listens on port 10022. Use different ports for every file transfer service and management endpoint enabled on both instances.

Instances on the same host still share its operating system, CPU, memory, storage, and network. Use a separate virtual machine when testing operating system changes, resource limits, failure isolation, or production performance.

Our quality assurance page explains how SFTPPlus releases are tested and how to design a representative end-to-end test. For questions about a particular testing or disaster recovery setup, contact the SFTPPlus team.