Last modified: Jun 4, 2024

About Altinn Broker

What is Altinn 3 Broker?

What is Altinn Broker?

The main use case for Altinn Broker is Managed File Transfer (MFT). It facilitates secure transmission of large files from one sender to one or more recipients. As such, it offers many benefits compared to alternative ad-hoc peer-to-peer file transfer solutions typically built on file transfer protocol (FTP), hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) or secure file transfer protocol (SFTP).

Main use case of Altinn Broker illustrated
Main use case of Altinn Broker illustrated: File F1 is conveyed from a sender to one or more recipients via intermediate storage.

While transfer of individual files is the main use case and original purpose of Altinn Broker, Altinn 3 Broker has been designed with some more advanced use cases and possible future extensions in mind. Advanced use cases and possible extensions are further described in separate sections.

Benefits of Altinn Broker

Compared to alternatives such as e.g., email, FTP or peer-to-peer file transfers, Altinn Broker offers a number of benefits. Some of the main benefits are:

  • Managed service: Take the burden off Service owners and their solution vendors - security, maintenance, certified compliance with relevant vendors - security, maintenance, certified compliance with relevant legislation and regulations.

  • Fault tolerance and resilience: Altinn Broker is planned to support fault tolerant delivery of very large files.

  • Scalability and availability: Cloud hosting, DDOS protection.

  • Connect to any system or user: Senders and recipients are de-coupled by separate upload and download processes; thus, each side is free to choose the preferred protocol for upload and download.

  • Support for several patterns and addressing schemes: One-to-one, one-to-many, content-based routing, and pub-sub.

  • Real-Time Data Transfer: Altinn Broker use APIs and system events to trigger uploads and downloads.

  • Observability and Auditability: End-to-end visibility of all activity, so you know the who, what, where, and when of data transfers. Quickly access file-transfer logs and analytics to audit transfer activity whenever needed.

  • Advanced monitoring: The built-in support for adding metadata to file transfers enables analysing file transfer sequences between multiple actors in
    end-to-end processes.