In today's connected world Data is supposed to be available everywhere and in every format. Connecting Partners in your value chain is essential. This however requires a solid reliable middleware, which orchestrates the file-transfer in a secure way.
BP is using since many years IntraNect MFT to connect and interact with 3rd Parties. They have decided to retire many homegrown and script-based solutions.
Due to the Cloud - Computing hype security standards are reviewed and updated more frequently and using a single-infrastructure allows you to implement the changes only once. This reduces the development time and even more important allows you to introduce new security policies even faster.
The strict workflow approach allows the easy set-up of file-transfers with a default security standard template. So in case your policy is preventing FTP transfers you simply need to disable this option and no FTP workflow can be set-up.
Apparently at Global Players those workflows regularly evolve into complex set-ups which increasingly becomes of interest for auditors too. Hence your MFT middleware should be READY FOR AUDIT. As our workflows usually document a business process we can prove at any moment that all involved systems had the exactly same data and we can even do this for historical data at any level. Nobody can interfere with your data (SOX-compliance).