Potential Breaking Change To Secure FTP Configurations On October 3rd

To align with data security best practices, we will implement an update during your region's overnight maintenance window on October 3, 2023, that will change the Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) file path used by many Blackbaud solutions in the Blackbaud Azure environment. Due to this update, there may be action required on your part to ensure processes relying on SFTP access continue to function after the update.How do I know if this applies to my organization?

This change may impact your organization if you use Blackbaud CRM™, Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT®, Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT®, or Blackbaud Altru® in a Blackbaud Azure environment and have an integration or automated process that references your SFTP file location. This can include some integrated partner solutions, third-party applications, software customizations, or automated processes that leverage a method like the SFTP-SSH Connector Action with Power Automate (to pull a file into Power BI for a report).



What action is required?

The action your organization may need to take depends on what type of pathing you use. If your organization only uses relative pathing (e.g. when using UNIX path notation “file.txt” or “folder1/file.txt”) for automations or customizations you should not need to take action before or after the update.



If you or your organization use absolute pathing to access SFTP (e.g. when using UNIX path notation “/file.txt” or “/folder1/file.txt”), you have two options:

• Change your paths to relative pathing: Follow the instructions in this KB article for the steps you will need to take.
• Continue using absolute pathing: After the update is implemented, follow the instructions in this KB article to ensure your SFTP customization processes continue to work. If you wish to follow this option, but do not take action after October 4, your SFTP customizations may no longer work. Note: If you have flows that run overnight, you may want to turn them off on October 3, then make the change on October 4 and manually run the flow before rescheduling your flow on the normal overnight cadence.

If you or your organization do not use any SFTP-dependent, automations, scripts, partner solutions and integrations, third-party services, product customizations, and/or extensibility frameworks that transfer files to or from your Blackbaud Azure environment's SFTP directory, you do not need to read this article as this change will not affect you.

• This change does not impact manual logins to the Blackbaud Azure environment's SFTP server through an FTP client.
• Out of box product functionality is not affected by this change.
• Your FTP server and FTP credentials are not changing.

If you have any questions, please start a discussion thread in this Community and tag Ashley Moose and Glen Hutson.